Alexandre R.J. Francois

Today I gave my first Prezi.com presentation, at the Workshop for Young French Scientists organized at USC by the Office for Science and Technology of the French Embassy in the US . I was introduced to this new presentation tool at the recent ACM Creativity & Cognition Conference. The zooming presentation model seems very promising, although I still have a lot to learn to fully utilize the medium. The non-powerpointness of the presentation was refreshing and, I believe, appreciated. Check out the presentation at: prezi.com/9gk_dql_-ife

An Ant's Life will be one of four projects presented to a panel of distinguished judges in competition for final awards in the SIGGRAPH 2009 Research Challenge competition , during the conference, on August 4, 2009, 1:45-3:00pm, at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, LA. The first person interactive game was collectively designed and prototyped by the 13 students in the Spring session of the course Collaborative Development of Interactive Software Systems (COMP150-CIS) at Tufts University , under the guidance of visiting assistant professor Alexandre R.J. François , who created the course. The SIGGRAPH 2009 competition challenged participants to "choose a specific animal, or a specific animal's sense, and develop a system that will enable a person to experience the physical or social world as that animal does." In An Ant's Life, the players experience the world as members of an ant colony, from hatching through successive life phases i...

Last semester (Spring 2007) I designed and taught a special session of CS201-Principles of Software Development for students pursuing a BS in Computer Science - Games at USC. The course, which centers around the development and realization of a collaborative class project , was featured in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering News , in an article titled: Games Students Play, and Make .