Students working in the Motion Capture Studio at Drexel.
Drexel’s Game Design program has once again landed in the Princeton Review’s Top 10 of best schools to study game design.
Two different lists of 25 schools were released: one for undergraduate programs and another for graduate programs. Drexel’s undergraduate Game Design program ranked fourth and the graduate program came in at seventh on its list.
The list is made up by The Princeton Review and PC Gamer magazine and is the result of surveys sent out to 150 programs. Sixty data points are collected and analyzed to compose the list.
Drexel’s programs, which are part of Westphal College of Media Arts & Design’s Digital Media Department, have made The Princeton Review list every year since its inception in 2010.
“Paul Diefenbach, PhD, [associate professor of digital media and computer science] and Frank Lee, PhD, [associate professor of digital media] were the pioneers who created the programs and it’s a source of great pride that we’ve been able to build up our faculty, under the leadership of Digital Media Department Head Michael Wagner,” said Westphal Dean Allen Sabinson. “The gaming faculty are active researchers collaborating on funded research with serious games and other investigations with colleagues in many other Drexel schools and colleges.”
Among the strengths of Drexel’s program are the Entrepreneurial Game Studio, which allows for students to turn their game ideas into commercial opportunities, as well as extensive research looking at the link between storytelling, artificial intelligence and game-based learning.
“The key strength of our game design program is its true interdisciplinary nature, spanning multiple departments and colleges, which provides students with a unique set of skills that are relevant to many potential career paths,” Wagner said. “In the graduate program, we use the latest technology based on state-of-the-art research in order to push the limits of the game medium in entertainment as well as serious applications.”
In addition to the top-ranked Game Design programs, for the 2015-16 school year, Drexel will offer a doctoral program in Digital Media, which will be the first PhD program available through Westphal.