I just wrapped up 2 final projects for my interaction design and information design courses today, taking a huge burden off of my shoulders. I figured I would show you what I've been working on at Georgia Tech. The final project for my interaction design class was a group project with 2 other students. We had the option of creating a multi-player game, multi-user interactive narrative or multi-user media content browser that had been designed for a hypothetical wall display supporting multi-touch capabilities. All projects had to be executed using Flash.

My group decided to proceed with a multi-player game inspired by the old Asteroids game with several enhancements to provide a stronger multi-player experience. Feel free to mess around with the game by clicking on the image below. However, keep in mind that it was made for a multi-touch wall display so it's no fun playing on a regular computer. Also, it likes to freeze/crash browsers so be warned. If you're interested about how to control certain aspects of the game flip through my PowerPoint presentation.

My other final project was a single, non-group project for my information design course. This one was by far the most interesting to build out. The project was basically "build something utilizing PHP and MySQL." I started out with a vague concept for a "party finder" kind of like Upcoming.org but aimed at a narrower demographic - specifically college kids. I ended up integrating user accounts, Google Maps via the Phoogle Maps PHP library which utilizes a Yahoo! Maps API for geocoding addresses as well as various novelties like Facebook-inspired profile pages and the ability to RSVP to parties.

However, the icing on the cake was my inclusion of the hCalendar microformat. It was actually very easy to implement - I already had PHP variables in my code for things like party date and time so it wasn't too hard to orient that into an hCal format. I made use of Left Logic's microformats bookmarklet to easily display them on my party finder web app. I was able to pull off a successful demo of microformats during my presentation by downloading a (hCal converted to ics by the microformats bookmarklet) file for a party and loading it into my Google Calendar account.

I started this information design course pretty much clueless about PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and Ajax. I have never been a programmer, always classifying myself as a "hardware guy" but I guess I can hold my own in coding now that I've got the basics down. This was the first time information design was ever offered at Georgia Tech and taught by a grad student from Carnegie Mellon. Hopefully they add more web-related courses.. such as the Computational Journalism (blogging) Computer Science course I'm enrolled in for next semester.

Unfortunately the burdens are not completely gone yet - I have finals for other classes next week.