Research data is optimized when it can be freely accessed and reused. To maximize research equity, transparency, and reproducibility, policymakers should take concrete steps to ensure that research software is openly accessible and reusable.

This paper presents and evaluates the first international game jam held at Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, Japan, in collaboration with the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, USA. Game jams are events that bring together people with a common love of games to plan, design, and make original, functional physical or computer games within a set time limit. The number of jams has increased rapidly year after year since their conception, with over 48,000 people participating in the latest version of the Global Game Jam [6]. The RU-RIT game jam had several goals. For the committee the main goals were to introduce the concept of a game jam, and pass on the knowledge of how to successfully plan and execute these events to the host institution, Ritsumeikan University. For the participants the goals were (1) to enjoy a fun and playful way to create games in a low-anxiety, mixed language environment, (2) to give the participants the opportunity to make contacts from around the globe, and (3) to learn new skills both related specifically to making games and other practical skills. This paper will further discusses the importance of group making in international game jam situations and aims to provide the reader with a blueprint describing how to create and administer their own international game jam. The paper will conclude by highlighting some of the issues encountered during the game jam.

The macro-structure of chemical-vapor-deposited (CVD) zinc sulfide (ZnS) substrates is characterized by cone-like structures that start growing at the early stages of deposition. As deposition progresses, these cones grow larger and reach centimeter size in height and millimeter size in width. It is challenging to polish out these features from the top layer, particularly for the magnetorheological finishing (MRF) process. A conventional MR fluid tends to leave submillimeter surface artifacts on the finished surface, which is a direct result of the cone-like structure. Here we describe the MRF process of polishing four CVD ZnS substrates, manufactured by four different vendors, with conventional MR fluid at pH 10 and zirconia-coated-CI (carbonyl iron) MR fluids at pH 4, 5, and 6. We report on the surface-texture evolution of the substrates as they were MRF polished with the different fluids. We show that performances of the zirconia-coated-CI MR fluid at pH 4 are significantly higher than that of the same fluid at pH levels of 5 and 6 and moderately higher than that of a conventional MR fluid at pH 10. An improvement in surface-texture variability from part to part was also observed with the pH 4 MR fluid. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We describe the anisotropy in the material removal rate (MRR) of the polycrystalline, chemical-vapor deposited zinc sulfide (ZnS). We define the polycrystalline anisotropy via microhardness and chemical erosion tests for four crystallographic orientations of ZnS: (100), (110), (111), and (311). Anisotropy in the MRR was studied under magnetorheological finishing (MRF) conditions. Three chemically and mechanically modified magnetorheological (MR) fluids at pH values of 4, 5, and 6 were used to test the MRR variations among the four single-crystal planes. When polishing the single-crystal planes and the polycrystalline with pH 5 and pH 6 MR fluids, variations were found in the MRR among the four single-crystal planes and surface artifacts were observed on the polycrystalline material. When polishing the single-crystal planes and the polycrystalline with the modified MR fluid at pH 4, however, minimal variation was observed in the MRR among the four orientations and a reduction in surface artifacts was achieved on the polycrystalline material.

In January of 2013, a prop maker/puppeteer in US Pacific Northwest collaborated with a carpenter in South Africa to produce the world's first home-created, 3D printed hand. They spread the word of their effort via a video on YouTube and released the designs as open source. In May of 2013, an RIT professor, inspired by the video, created a simple Google Map mashup to link people who needed similar devices with people who'd be willing to print them. And so the e-NABLE project was born. By June of 2016 the e-NABLE Google Plus community had over 8,600 members and e-NABLE had delivered around 2,000 hands to children in 50 countries. Some “e-NABLErs” are students and faculty in middle schools, high schools and colleges around the world. One physical hub of this on-line volunteer effort is the e-NABLE Lab, part of the Center for Media, Art Games Interaction and Creativity (MAGIC) at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The Enable Community Foundation has compiled a collection of curricular models and materials to support the growth of e-NABLE efforts by students and their teachers. This work-in-progress paper will cover the current status of e-NABLE efforts in and out of the classroom. It will then detail the hardware and software needed to create hands and teach courses (a wide range of inexpensive 3D printers and low-cost or free software will suffice). Next it will provide an overview of the types of curricula and materials available for schools around the world to use with students of all ages. Lastly it will detail one particular program, a summer job-training program at the Vertus Charter School in Rochester, New York, in depth as an example of a school-based e-NABLE program that has been successful.

This workshop introduces participants to the pedagogy and practice of using Free/Open Source Software development practices into their curriculum, and then guides them through deployment of a turnkey courseware framework to be used for their own courses. The framework supports automatic blog checking, automatically generated student profile pages, Gravatar integration for profile pictures, Travis-CI continuous Integration tests, and repository changes reported via Github webhooks to IRC. Participants will learn how to use Github in the Classroom, the basics of Flask, a python web framework, and how to deploy their courseware to Red Hat's OpenShift Cloud, a free Platform-as-a-Service to host courseware and/or other web sites.

This poster will briefly show and describe the five year history of FOSS course offerings and projects in the School of Interactive Games and Media that led to the development of the minor and then diagram and describe the Minor's design and content. It will show how the Humanitarian focus of the student work, beginning with the development of educational games for the One Laptop per Child and Sugar communities built a foundation for the minor. It will then discuss the design of the minor, how the required courses leading to advanced electives also prepare students to become contributors and, potentially, project leaders within Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture communities within the students' own academic specializations. It will diagram the paths that both technical and non-technical students can take to succeed in completing the minor.

This poster will briefly describe the components of the Humanitarian Free/Open Source Software Development (HFOSS) course offered by the Department of Interactive Games and Media at Rochester Institute of Technology in Upstate NY. It will depict this model of an "Open" Course (i.e. Open Courseware, Open Curriculum, Open Classroom, and Open Code) informed both by academic theory, and industry best practice. It will show the results of designers, developers, and project leaders, working in tandem with professors, staffers, and administrators to offer students a chance to apply research, and put theory into practice. It will discuss strategies of engagement, metrics of success and failure, and what resources are available for others to do the same.

To date, there have been efforts toward creating better health information access for Deaf American Sign Language (ASL) users. However, the usability of websites with access to health information in ASL has not been evaluated. Our article focuses on the usability of four health websites that include ASL videos. We seek to obtain ASL users' perspectives on the navigation of these ASL-accessible websites, finding the health information that they needed, and perceived ease of understanding ASL video content. ASL users (n = 32) were instructed to find specific information on four ASL-accessible websites, and answered questions related to (a) navigation to find the task, (b) website usability, and (c) ease of understanding ASL video content for each of the four websites. Participants also gave feedback on what they would like to see in an ASL health library website, including the benefit of added captioning and/or signer model to medical illustration of health videos. Participants who had lower health literacy had greater difficulty in finding information on ASL-accessible health websites. This article also describes the participants' preferences for an ideal ASL-accessible health website, and concludes with a discussion on the role of accessible websites in promoting health literacy in ASL users.

Photo-thermal deflection (PD) method is one of the typical pump-probe techniques for absorption evaluation. In this study, the PD method was used for detection of a signature of laser-induced damage prior to critical destruction. A setup for the PD technique was incorporated into the nanosecond damage testing system and the absorption of some optics was measured in combination with N-on-l damage test. The absorption decreased with pulse-laser irradiation at first. Then, the absorption increased at some point. Finally, the laser damage was caused and the absorption decreased. The relaxation times of the absorption were also evaluated to reveal the reason for the variation. The measured results indicated that the decrease came from the disposal of initial contamination and the effect might be considered as laser conditioning. On the other hand, the increase of the absorption might be attributed to generation of laser-induced defects (self-trapped excitons).

Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of GamingT. L. TaylorCambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Appendix, notes, bibliography, index. 304 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780262017374In Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Gaming, author T. L. Taylor examines the ups and downs of a slowly emerging industry, e-sports (electronic sports). The e-sports industry aims to turn real-time video game competition into the next major professional sport-complete with franchises, broadcast tournaments, superstar players, and mogul team and league managers. Those who would make e-sports a success point to South Korea, the only country so far in which the industry has taken hold. Taylor tells us that tournaments like the World Cyber Games draw sponsors like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Samsung and that Korean Telecom companies, and even the Korean Navy have-or sponsor-teams. Outside of the promised land of South Korea, however, e-sports have struggled and exist as a generally small, niche industry.Taylor's book does an excellent job of examining e-sports through numerous lenses. Providing historical context, she takes us back to the roots of e-sports, delving into the early days of informal, head-to-head video game competitions around the first computer game, Space War! (1962) and the inclusion of highscore record keeping on arcade machines to arcade-based tournaments (still happening today on the old machines like Pac Man and Donkey Kong and chronicled in the 2007 documentary King of Kong) and the video game-themed Starcade (1982- 1984) television show. She then moves to the emergence of the on-line networked play of Id Software's Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) through today's current live and networked tournaments of firstperson shooters and other video game competitions. Yet Raising the Stakes is not just a historical effort. With her first book, Play between Worlds: Exploring On-Line Game Culture, Taylor established herself as a solid analyst of games as media and community.And Taylor brings those skills to bare on gaming as a sport. For example, in her second chapter, titled Computer Games a Professional Sport, Taylor guides us through an in-depth, well-reasoned, and documented analysis. She cites the literature on the debates around computer games as play. She examines the modification of rules, and occasionally of systems, of the games themselves for tournament play, judging, and broadcast. She compares the requirements and practices of professional sports and professional athletes (mental and physical training, hours and routines of practice, preferences for specific brands and makes of equipment or insistence on the use of personal equipment) in other sports to those of professional gamers. …

This paper briefly describes the five year [1] history of Free and Open Source Software course offerings and projects at RIT and how the Humanitarian focus of the student work built the foundation for the minor. It will then discuss the design of the minor, how the required courses lead to advanced électives via multiple paths, and how it and prepares students to become contributors and potential project leaders within their own future Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture communities.

Over the last several years, faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology's School of Interactive Games and Media have been working with students to refine their ideas regarding game design, game production, and the overall ideation process. Most of our students are technology focused, and have to learn the process of communicating their ideas in a practical manner. They must learn the balance between being passionate about their ideas and forming a cogent argument as to why their idea matters. In short, they must learn the difference between having "the great idea" and being able to ideate over hundreds, if not thousands of ideas. Through the use of the game concept pitch as a tool for communicating their ideas, we are challenging students to express themselves in a particular way. Over the course of the semester, we explore game concept pitch processes, critique, iteration, and refinement of the student's ideas as well as presentation and communication skills. We also examine how the process of "first pitch" is applicable to wider areas of computing, engineering, and science education along with career and field skills.

A low-temperature chemical cleaning approach has been developed to improve the performance of multilayer dielectric pulse-compressor gratings for use in the OMEGA EP laser system. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy results guided the selection of targeted cleaning steps to strip specific families of manufacturing residues without damaging the grating's fragile 3D profile. Grating coupons that were cleaned using the optimized method consistently met OMEGA EP requirements on diffraction efficiency and 1054 nm laser-damage resistance at 10 ps. The disappearance of laser-conditioning effects for the highest-damage-threshold samples suggests a transition from a contamination-driven laser-damage mechanism to defect-driven damage for well-cleaned components.

The following paper proposes a new two-step framework for the analysis of serious games, one that first looks at their use for personal and/or professional contexts. It then looks at the challenges serious game developers face in today’s entertainment driven environment. It suggests that societal and market challenges must be resolved to allow for the creation of serious games that can successfully compete for an audience’s attention and examine two prototype games with an appropriate mix of content and form but face several hurdles to succeed as full featured commercial products. In conclusion it suggests ways for serious games overcome these hurdles. KEYOWORDS: EDUCATION, SERIOUS GAMES, FRAMEWORK, MONETIZATION, PRODUCTION OF GAMES

The mechanical response of optical multilayer dielectric (MLD) diffraction gratings has been studied using nanoindentation. The results are interpreted using a stress-strain model, which reveals a uniaxial yield stress of 4.1 GPa. It is shown that the indentation response of the high-aspect ratio “pillar” geometry (constrained in one transverse direction but free in the other) can be expressed in terms of yield stress rather than material hardness.