The LSU Digital Design and Emergent Media STEM Certification Pathway began in 2016 with the goal of increasing the number of students taking high-quality LSU STEM courses from LSU-trained and supported teachers.
The three pillars of the DDEM pathway are:
The Digital Design and Emergent Media pathway teaches industry-based technical skills that prepare students for a career in creative technology. Click a dropdown to view some of the specific skills that are covered.
These courses will be based on hands on training in the use computer hardware and software to create digital graphics, starting with the basics of Photoshop and Illustrator and continuing to Maya and Blender.
Sound Design has students learning the fundamentals of music: what goes into writing, performing, recording, editing, and analyzing multiple styles of composition. After a crash course in the fundamentals of music theory: scales, chords, notation, etc.
The Interactive Digital Media Capstone course brings together the core courses in Media Design and Production with the concepts of User Interface Design (UID), User Experience Design (UX), and creative coding to develop team based projects.
This course introduces students to the basic ideas of computational thinking and its applications to problem solving in STEM fields. Students will use an open source, Web-based programming environment to create code for simple drawings, animations and simulations, through which they learn how to use abstraction, decomposition, and pattern recognition to model problems and arrive to an algorithmic solution.
Coding for the Web teaches the language of JavaScript. The class starts at an introductory level, giving students a strong grasp of the basic JavaScript syntax. The foundational aspects of the course, such as variables, operators, conditional statements and more give the students a basis for understanding the more complex topics, such as loops and functions.
From this course, students will gain a holistic view of the esports industry. They will be able to understand various facets of what goes into making an esports event and be able to identify key decisions an organization has made when creating an event.
Introduction to Video Game Design exposes students to the fundamentals of creating video games using the Godot game engine and its native scripting language, GDScript. Students design, code, and build small and large projects aimed at developing coding, teamwork, and critical thinking skills.
This is a project based learning (PBL) inspired course that utilizes a PBL assessment guide in addition to thoughtful integrated learning. Throughout the course, experimentation and the practice of storytelling through the lenses of multiple mediums allows students to develop narrative reasoning skills while simultaneously giving them a realm to be creative and challenged.
Programming Digital Media is a course designed to familiarize students with the Javascript Coding language through real-time graphics generation, audio processing, and game design. Students will also explore physical computing with Arduino, ultimately creating controllers for their own custom 2d games.