Students Take Classroom Training to the Courts -- The Advocate, Louisiana

LAFAYETTE — Fifteen-year-old Daniel Solieau made a basketball goal Thursday afternoon in the park.

“He made that,” said his teacher, Kit Becnel and she wasn’t talking about the basket.

The basketball court and the park it sits in was designed and created virtually by Solieau and a team of his fellow Carencro High Academy of Information Technology students.

The students are part of a project called FiberKids that creates and researches ways to harness fiber optic technology to enhance classroom learning.

The setting for the virtual park: the nearly 100-acre University of Louisiana at Lafayette-owned green space known as the Horse Farm.

While the students used the Horse Farm as their inspiration, students built in versatility to enable other schools to replicate the model and localize it for their own community, explained Becnel, who is the director of the Academy of Information Technology at Carencro High.

Using the context of the game, the students worked together in a lab as a team, but also collaborated virtually with students at Apex Senior High School near Raleigh, N.C., and De La Salle Institute in Chicago.

Students worked intermittently throughout the summer and for the past two weeks daily with ULL Create, a collaborative of faculty and researchers focused on interactive graphics and virtual realization. Team members, as well as industry experts, worked with students as mentors.

“They’re experiencing what I can’t offer them in my classroom,” Becnel said. “They’ve been working in a more of a work environment. I can mimic that in the classroom, but this is the real deal.”

The students have also been mentoring each other and learning valuable lessons in teamwork and problem solving, Becnel said.

As part of the project, students have also been documenting their work in a video and on a web blog.

The game is timely. On Thursday, City-Parish President Joey Durel proposed that the city purchase the Horse Farm to move forward on plans to develop a park there.

Durel’s welcome to play the game when it’s done, joked Becnel and Dirk Reiners, an assistant professor with ULL’s Center for Advanced Computer Studies and ULL Create.

While the player can choose and place amenities, the game also educates the player about

the property’s history. The game includes a virtual museum with pictures and video about the history of the farm.

Learning how to edit in Final Cut Pro, the industry standard, has been an invaluable part of the experience, said Elijah Parker, 17, and an incoming senior at the academy.

“It’s different than what we learn in class because I had an industry expert come in and mentor me,” Parker said.

Players can also take a virtual tour of Lafayette. Academy of Information Technology grad and ULL visual arts major Jake Barousse worked with the team to build virtual 3-D models of some of the city’s landmark buildings. On Thursday afternoon, he finessed a model of Borden’s ice cream shop.

The academy directed him to his current path at ULL, where he’s studying animation and 3-D modeling, he said.

“I don’t think I would have heard of Maya, (a 3-D animation software) outside of the academy, and it helped nurture my interest in it,” Barousse said.

Nurturing that talent is part of the reason why ULL faculty have partnered with the academy, Reiners explained.

“One of the issues we have at UL is to get good local grad students,” Reiners said.

The majority of graduate students in CACS are from India or China, while most of the undergraduates are local students, he explained.

Reiners said he hopes students’ early exposure to the technologies and opportunities available in emerging fields such as interactive graphics may entice them.

“Hopefully we can get them excited and interested in this field,” he said.