Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
The 59 high school students who participated in the 2009 Camp ARCH summer program held July 12-18 at the Texas A&M College of Architecture had an opportunity to customize their own curriculum.
While some students spent the action-packed week on the Texas A&M campus exploring the fundamentals of architecture in a design studio, others learned how to create a computer-animated video in the college’s renowned Visualization Laboratory. In the process, all Camp ARCH participants were immersed in a unique interdisciplinary experience designed to familiarize them with educational and career opportunities in the built and virtual environment disciplines taught at the college.
Campers pursing the architecture track were asked to design a theme park in a studio led by Jorge Vanegas, dean of the college, and Jennifer Olson, an architect with The Arkitex Studio in Bryan.
“We didn’t put any stipulations on what they had to include in their theme park, or what the theme should be,” said Olson. “We asked them to be as creative as possible in coming up with a theme, and propose it in an architectural form.”
Students learned about architectural concepts along the way.
“If you’re designing a theme park, you’ll have very different scales you’ll need to address, such as the whole park, down to the individual buildings, and then down to human scale, which is kind of the ultimate architectural scale,” she said.
The campers, said Olson, learned that architects work in teams both in school and in the practicing world. After teams were formed on the second day of camp, they did some introductory team-building exercises, and then immediately launched into the project, learning what it’s like to create in a collaborative setting.
“Even within the short week of the camp you could start to see how they would delegate based on their own strengths and take on responsibility,” she said.
Olson was impressed with the final models.
“They were all spectacular,” she said. “They really only had three days, so it was really a very short period of time where they were able to get visuals for their ideas.”
The 12 campers with an interest in the virtual environment developed an animation under the direction of graduate student Doug Bell, who’s graduating this August with a Master of Science in Visualization Sciences degree.
“We wanted to expose them to 3-D stereoscopic images, what the Viz lab has to offer as far as computer graphics and computer information systems, the merging between art and computer science,” said Bell, who wrapped up his fourth year teaching the “Viz” segment of Camp ARCH.
“On the first day, they learned how to create a story with a conflict between two characters. They proposed a short film and other students added on to it,” he said.
Then, Bell familiarized the students with digital animation software such as Maya, Adobe Aftereffects and Adobe Photoshop, which students used to perform short exercises with simple models.
From there, Bell guided the students through introductions to rigging, rendering and lighting.
“Basically, that’s taking the 3-D models they created on the computer, adding virtual nodes for their characters’ skeletal systems and setting up a scene around their characters, creating a 3-D environment for them to animate,” he said.
They also got to meet an animator from the Walt Disney studio, one of a series of Disney staffers who are working with Texas A&M visualization students in a summer video production studio.
Throughout the week, the students had the option to work on their project outside allotted class time or join fellow campers in various fun-filled activities held throughout the Bryan-College Station area. Bell said they did a little bit of both.
“I’m glad they chose to work on a large project all together,” he said. “Unity is something we strive for in the Viz Lab. Anybody can go to any school online and learn these things for themselves, but what they get from Texas A&M is a well-rounded education from working together.”
In addition to their design and visualization experiences, campers went swimming, received archery lessons, attended a Brazos Valley Bombers baseball game, and wrapped up their week with a final presentation to their families at a Saturday July 18 brunch.
College faculty, friends and students who facilitated Camp ARCH 2009 were: Leslie Feigenbaum, dean of the program; Ann Eastwood, program coordinator; student counselors Jennifer Branaham, Aneesa Castaneda, Alex Coleman, Brent Laumen, Zara Perciful, Jordan Shrode, Ken Stone, Jenny Whisenhunt, and Chris Zoeller; Jorge Venegas, environmental design studio director; Jennifer Olsen, assistant environmental design studio instructor; Joy Sechelski, art studio teacher (sponsored by The Arkitek Studio Inc.; Ann McGowen, CPR & first aid instructor for counselors and archery instructor; Doug Bell, visualization studio director; Lars Doucet, Alethea Bair, and Ryan Bland, guest visualization speakers; John Peters, photographer; Trisha Gottchalk and Stacy Hazlett, volunteers with serving meals and snacks; Dale Mayteda, guest speaker from Disney Studios, and Tell Butler and his facility management crew.
- Posted: July 16, 2009 -
