Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) is a class taken by every student at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center in their first semester.
Each student is assigned one role for the entirety of the semester: programmer, artist, or sound designer. The class consists of 5 rounds. Every round lasts 1-3 weeks and consists of a brand new project to be completed by an all new team composed of 2 programmers, 2 artists, and 1 sound designer. Additionally, these projects are to be designed for exciting new hardware platforms that are likely to be entirely new to everyone on the team such as the Oculus Rift, Microsoft Kinect, PlayStation Move, MaKey MaKey, and more.
This class acts as a crash course in teamwork, collaborative creative projects, rapid prototyping and iteration.