Hi, my name is Angela Wei and I am a computer engineering major. How that came to be I am not really sure. I love drawing, painting and reading. I guess some time in high school I realized I enjoyed doing math problems and programming, too. However, once I got to college, I noticed half of my brain had possibly melted. Mortified, I quickly took action to salvage what was left and here I am now sitting in an impressive green room/garage intimidated, but pretty excited.

Both of my parents are from Shanghai, but I was born and raised here in Maryland. Being able to visit China is a gift I am so glad to have. I also have a younger sister and a cat named Amy. I trip over my own feet far too often and when I’m not running into tree branches I like to stare out the window and think about the funny world we live in. I love all things Harry Potter and Avatar (not the movies), and one day I hope to be a part of something that will bring everyone together. I also enjoy dark chocolate and ice cream.

Hello/Privyet/Guten Tag/Sawasdee khrap everyone! (pick the language you prefer to be greeted in)

My name is Jason Robinson, and I am from everywhere. I was raised in a military family, so I have spent approximately 15 years of my life living everywhere except here! I have attended school in Moscow, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Bangkok, so I’m really excited to have a guaranteed 4 years living in the same general area! Here at Maryland, I am transitioning from the school of music to the school of engineering (makes sense, right?), and I am trying my darndest to be a civil or electrical engineer. I’ve been playing trombone since 5th grade, so music has been a consistent part of my life throughout all the moving around my family has done. This is the reason that I chose my avatar to be a picture of me in the band room practicing my horn; music is a huge part of me and I think that my avatar represents that.

My extracurricular activities revolve largely around music as well. Here at College Park I am a member of the 250-strong Mighty Sound of Maryland! I march trombone and have loved every second of it – performing at football and basketball games is a blast and I really enjoy being able to combine my two favorite things, music and sports! I am also a member of the Gamma Xi chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi, which is a music service fraternity on campus. I am a huge Orioles and Ravens fan, so it’s great to be rooting for two teams that are finally having success again.

For this course, I am mostly interested in the concept of machinima – I find machinima really fun to both create and watch and I look forward to learning more about how to use the genre effectively. I have been previously exposed to Red vs. Blue and various community-created Source Filmmaker videos, so machinima is a tool that I had already been interested in, so I am excited to learn more about it.

Hey my name is Megan and I’m an Architecture major, which makes me awesome! I didn’t really have any desire to be an architect until senior year of high school so there’s no exciting life-long dream story there. I live in Queen Anne’s with a majority of the DCC kids and I never want to leave!

I’m in this class because I think creating houses/buildings/stuff is kind of like telling a story. You start with a basic idea, add and remove details, and play with the aesthetics until you create a unique and memorable experience. I believe that all art and creative works tell stories and each “author” has a unique way of getting his story out into the world. I am excited to learn new ways to share these ideas through digital technologies!

I chose the Lorax as my avatar because I see myself as a kind of Lorax, and not just in terms of environmental consciousness. When I feel strongly about an issue, I feel that it is my duty to speak up about it and give a voice to those who have none. When I believe in something, I give it my all to educate those around me (as some people have seen on Facebook). I hope that this class will help me to express my beliefs in new and creative ways.

Hey guys, my name is Sara. Even though I am in the DCC program I do not live with everyone in Queen Ann’s. I live with FLEXUS, another living and learning program for woman in engineering.

I am a Fire Protection Engineering major. People always ask me how I came to choose this major since it is so small and relatively unknown. When I was younger I liked to mess around with fire. When I first leaned that there was a whole field of engineering dedicated to fire safety I became very intrigued. UMD has been a great place to fuel my interest in this major.

Outside of school I always enjoy a good day at the beach, especially when the sun is really hot. I also like roller-coasters and roaming around DC with friends. My absolute favorite food is Watermelon. Oh, and I love my family!

Because I really love watermelon, I will make my avatar a picture of one.

This is a memory.

The puppy became our new best friend. He’d run and we’d run. He’d get this fire in his eyes and sprint off in spirals and circles and make us dizzy. He was fierce. He was wild. He was loving. We watched “Marley and Me” and he barked his head off at Marley and Owen Wilson. He chewed my favorite hat. He changed us – my sister talked more, my dad talked more, my mom reveled in comfort. He was our missing piece. Our puppy.

And as I go on into the future as a journalism and government major at Maryland, this memory – stories – sticks with me. My puppy as my avatar tells me to remember my past and my heritage, my present with two homes in College Park and Mason, OH, and my future. Wherever that might be. But for now, I’m just me. I love writing, the news, reading, newspapers and news organizations, food, the Beatles and going new places.

I can bring solid InDesign knowledge and basic Photoshop and Illustrator skills to the class. I also know WordPress pretty well and enjoy taking photos – some of which turn out satisfactorily.

I’m excited to learn more ways to think about writing news in this class – I want to be a political reporter when I grow up – but also to explore that persuasive and fiction side of me that gets locked up behind all the journalism sometimes.

My name is Kat Averell and I am an English major here at UMD, and here at UMD is somewhere I am super glad to be this fall. You see, I spent this summer working two jobs and that was an exhausting if monetarily rewarding experience. Now, I could go on with a few random facts about my life, but I think you would get a better idea of what I’m all about if I explain why I chose to take the class.

I’d like to draw your attention to my icon, that odd and slightly eerie blue dot to the left. That is the star Vega–or more accurately, a mid-infrared image of the debris disk around Vega. I’m fascinated by astronomy, particularly the cultural associations and myths attached to the stars and constellations. The stars have been our most widespread and constant inspiration for literally the entirety of human history–doesn’t that just blow your mind? The stars are something that nearly every human that has ever been has seen! Looking at the similarities and differences in the myths across cultures and over time is a study in the wonders of the human imagination. In Chinese legend, Vega and the other vertices of the Summer Triangle tell the story of a weaver woman separated from her family, while the ancient Greeks placed the star in a constellation of Orpheus’s lyre. Meanwhile, the ancient Egyptians and Indians, and later medieval Europeans, all associated Vega with a vulture or eagle. That we so consistently take the abstract and mysterious and craft from it order and emotion–in short, stories–is to me the greatest thing about human intellect. Storytelling is the very foundation of culture and consciousness, and that’s why I’ve made it my mission to study it. I’m very excited to start exploring digital forms of storytelling as a new canvas for the oldest art known to man, and look forward to spending time in this endeavor with the staff of MITH and my good DCC friends!

Hi everyone, my name is Greg Baroni. I am a 20 year old sophomore hailing from Potomac, MD currently studying to become an Aeronautical Engineer and a member of the DCC Beta Class. I play and watch football and baseball and practice several facets of Mixed Martial Arts. I am kind of shy, but really enjoy being around people, helping, and listening to them talk about the things they are passionate about. I love my family, which consists of my wonderful Mother and Father, younger sister and brother, and my puppy Lily. I am a fan of the New York Giants and Yankees, Legos, Halo, and the color Red.

I chose to base my avatar on a picture of Master Chief from the most recent installment of the Halo series, Halo 4.  I am a huge fan of the Halo series and wanted to pay tribute to the series that inspired me to join DCC by including it in my avatar. The black and white coloration was an edit I did because when these colors are juxtaposed with only one another, they provide a distinct contrast and highlight some details of a design that may otherwise go unnoticed. It allows one to gain a greater appreciation to how much went into a design when the more subtle intricacies are more apparent. On a more generalized note, I wanted the avatar to remind and encourage the viewer to look beyond the superficial elements of designs before making an evaluation of their quality.

On a more personal note, will be using the Halo series as a focal part of my Capstone project; I will be aiming to design as much of a game, my take on Halo 5, as possible. The finished product would include a detailed script, complete with player and AI dialogue, cutscene sequences, descriptions of environments, sketches of key items and characters, as well as other supporting elements. Giving my take on a game was something I had always wanted to do, and I chose this class because I believe it will aid in the creation of the script, and help develop the plot into one that is truly memorable and noteworthy, not just a cliche, run-of-the-mill progression of events. I have very much to look forward to in this class and cannot wait to get started!

Well hello there! I am Alexis Anthony. I am currently a sophomore journalism major, but will be switching to public relations and minoring in survey methodology. I’m from Columbia, MD and graduated in 2011 from Oakland Mills High School. I love working with people (I just went through two weeks of team builders for my job training and I was in heaven) and problem-solving. I really enjoy writing, too, hence being a journalism major and taking this class. I’m very excited to expand my storytelling skills to different forms of media in the semester.

Hmmm, what else? I love to sing. I LOVE to sing. Probably too much, but that’s beside the point. Also, I love all of the colors of the rainbow; yellow has my heart, though. Therefore, my Avatar is an adorable little yellow bow, which symbolizes my bubbly personality and bountiful cheerfulness.

I fee like I need to expand this little biography more, but I really can’t think of what else to say. I am a Community Assistant for the Department of ResLife and I work at the Queen Anne’s front desk. I’m a human resources assistant for DOTS. I also spent my summer working for Merriweather Post Pavilion, where I have been working the past four years. I love all of my jobs; the people make the job and I adore all of my coworkers.

I like to go to the gym. A lot. And as a girl, you’d think I was intimidated by the big burly men lifting 400 lb. weights as I try to bench the 45 lb. bar,  but I could care less. The guys are too concerned about looking macho to judge my laughable routine. So I just keep on keepin’ on.

All right. I’m out of material. But by now I should have been able to paint some kind of picture of myself (which is necessary since my avatar does not actually look a thing like me. I mean, c’mon. I’m not a bow).

Hi! My name is Benjy Cannon, and I’m a sophomore government and politics major. My interest in digital storytelling actually started with a project I helped with at Spark Media, a film studio that was working on a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Spark had produced a documentary, Soul of a People, which told the story of the Federal Writers Project, a subset of FDR’s Federal works project. I helped them design a game, which put the player in the shoes of one of the writers in an interactive forum which sought to recreate the guidebooks written by FDR’s crew through the Internet.

I’m super passionate about memes and their potential for bringing people together. It strikes me as incredible that a supposed “inside” joke can be shared by so many people.

As my major may imply, I’m totally obsessed with everything political (aka everything at all, because everything is kind of political), and I absolutely love literature. I sometimes joke to myself that I would have been an English major in an ideal world, usually before realizing that my government degree won’t help me get much more of a job.

I used to own a copy of Microsoft’s 3D Movie Maker, which was a really cool tool for telling digital stories. It was definitely geared at kids, but it had some really fantastic creative uses.  It fed my need for creativity for the longest time, until it became incompatible with my OS (it was originally designed for Windows 95). Since then, I’ve been searching for a piece of software/a method to continue to apply that outlet, and am eagerly anticipating getting it out of this class.

Also I chose a cannon as my Avatar, not because I endorse violent imagry, but because my name is Benjy Cannon and tend to jump on the opportunity to utilize visual representations of my surname.

A self diagnosed technophobe, pathological truth-teller, and a creature of pure, unrepentant evil, Monica is an English major and plot enthusiast who was taken in from an early age by a wild pack of computer science majors and trained in the art of virtual war. While she has embraced their gamer culture and become fluent in their geekspeak, she remains a permanent duck out of water technologically, and takes great comfort in using stories and writing to ease herself into the digital medium. When she is not warring with computer science majors or plotting world domination, she attempts to write novels and draws webcomics in her spare time.

Monica is a shrewd but somewhat lazy plot predator, who is built for ambush and short bursts of speed rather than research sessions requiring stamina. As a result, she tends to lurk on Rotten Tomatoes and TV Tropes in order to supplement her own observations as she hunts down the elusive components that make stories effective at evoking emotion. Her latest interest is studying the horror genre. She keeps a diary documenting effective techniques, and is always on the lookout for more. She practically salivated upon noticing this class.