News

Congratulations to the 2021 interns and coaches for a successful internship. Over the course of 8 weeks the 25 interns learned game design and development, project management, and teamwork.

This year, we had added a unique element to the internship experience by partnering with video game maker Ubisoft. Their initiatives to support neurodiverse employees merged with our interests to ready the same individuals for work and we both saw it as an opportunity to learn from each other. Ubisoft provided our interns with individualized support in creating code and content as well as feedback from an industry perspective. We hope to continue this fruitful collaboration.

Again, due to the pandemic, the internship was largely held remotely; though we had an opportunity to bring a small number of interns into the lab safely (masked and social distanced) to experience an in-person work environment. We look forward to holding our internship program in person next, health and safety permitting.

Try their games on Itch: https://pongcenter.itch.io/

See their presentations on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E1-fOjHPlk

Congratulations to PoNG’s founder Leanne Chukoskie on her tenure track Associate Professor position at Northeastern University! She is now faculty in the Department of Physical Therapy, Movement, and Rehabilitation Science in the Bouvé College of Health, and the Games Program in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University. She plans to extend her work with sensor-enabled experiences and neurodiverse young adults in the newly formed ReGame XR lab. She passes on lead directorship of PoNG to Joe Snider.

Graduate students Trent Simmons and Sundararaman Rengarajan have transferred to Northeastern to continue their graduate work with Leanne. Ara Jung also joined Leanne in Boston to manage the ReGame XR lab.

Trish Stone has stepped away from PoNG to focus on curating the QI Gallery.

Jack Chen took a new position with Creative Coding Careers, working with our colleague and collaborator Mike Roberts, as a Software Engineer.

Khalil Jackson has transferred to Jules Jaffe’s lab at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography where he will help design visualization for underwater audio.

Student artist Corly Huang has graduated and moved on to bigger and better things. Her spot is filled by the very talented Cindy Lin; a computer science major with some serious artistic chops.

We would like to welcome Trish Stone, Programs Coordinator for Qualcomm Institute, Calit2, UC San Diego, as PoNG Center’s Creative Director! Trish will also serve to mentor interdiciplinary student groups in the AIP program alongside Leanne Chukoskie at Qualcomm Institute’s Learning Academy.

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After the successful 2020 PoNG Summer Internship Showcase event, PoNG Center’s Leanne Chukoskie, along with her fellow panelists Torrie Dunlap, Amy Johnson, and Mike Roberts each shared their personal views on the importance of diversity within the tech industry while answering audience questions about this topic.

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Congratulations to developers at PoNG Center Trent Simmons, Khalil Jackson, and Corly Huang for winning the Grand Challenge FIRST prize at iLRNFuser @ the iLRN2020 Virtual Conference!

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Leanne Chukoskie of the Power of NeuroGaming Center came together with Kids Included Together’s CEO Torrie Dunlap to recommend games our kids can play during the pandemic while being precautious of online safety.