Student helps design game for Department of Energy

Android and iOS users should be on the lookout for this sometime next month; because of the assistance of an IUP staudent and other individuals, the U.S. Department of Energy will be releasing a game for those mobile device platforms.  

Katharine Uvick (senior, computer science) is involved in a virtual internship along with 20 other students from across the country.  

They have the privilege to help design this game.  

“I’m used to working with people in-person, so it was an adjustment I had to make,” Uvick said,  “but web conferencing lets you have access to people with different talents in different parts of the world.  This experience showed me challenges that actual companies might face.”

The game is, essentially, a free app  that is meant to encourage recruitment among people in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics fields), but also reach a broad audience in their mobile platform audience.  

It presenys the players with fun and challenging puzzles that involve linking buildings and energy resources.  

It will connect to potential employees by roughly simulating what challenges the Department of Energy must think about in their work.

Uvick was motivated to take the internship in order to get some experience for her dream career.

“My dream job is to be either a programmer or a designer for the video game industry,” Uvick said.  “I wanted to find an internship that would allow me to work with game design and allow me to be creative with it,” Uvick said.  “The director of the project wanted to give all of us involved some experience in the field of game design.  Also, I’ve taken some animation software classes and I even draw in my spare time.  This project could be used as a portfolio piece, as I’m searching for a job in the video game industry.”  

The project is expecting the game’s release sometime in October.

“There are no guarantees on that deadline, but I believe that with hard work [and] everybody equally contributing, we won’t have a problem with hitting that target date,” Uvick said.  “The game will be released for both Android and iOS mobile device platforms.”