Etcetera edutainment

Etcetera Edutainment
Industry Serious Game Development
Founded Pittsburgh, PA (2005)
Founder Jessica Trybus, Don Marinelli
Headquarters Pittsburgh,PA
Key people
 Eben Myers (VP of Design), Ken Smith (President)
Website www.etceteraedutainment.com

Etcetera Edutainment is a serious game development company based in Western Pennsylvania. It was founded in 2005 as a spin out from Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center. The company's games are used primarily for training purposes and primarily focuses on driving behavior changes through digital coaching and assessment. Etcetera Edutainment's products are used by Fortune 500 companies across several industries including retail, healthcare, government, academia, and manufacturing with both clients and employees using the products.[1]

Etcetera Edutainment is headquartered in Pittsbugh, PA, in the Strip District neighborhood of the city.[2]

Company History

After current CEO, Jessica Trybus, earned a Masters Degree in Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon, Donald Marinelli and Jessica started Etcetera Edutainment. Their first employee was Eben Myers, the current VP of Design for the company. The company's first focus was on computer training simulations for the health care and manufacturing fields with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Alcoa as their first clients.[3]

From the success with Alcoa, Etcetera Edutainment began working on a custom game development engine, called Crucible. Crucible played a major role in the company first fledged attempt on multi-player games. The first game developed was Alcoa Safe Dock. This game simulated the dozens of roles in a warehouse and allowed dozens of individuals to simulate those roles all in the same world, in an effort to simulate real warehouse conditions without any of the injury risk and at a significantly lower cost. Etcetera further used Crucible in developing Crowdplay, one of the first crowd play games that were popular in the late 2000s, especially at movie theaters and other public venues.

Since abandoning Crucible, the company utilizes the Unity game development engine for all of their projects.

In 2012, the company shifted focus once more with the development of their simcoach framework. simcoach is a coaching and assessment tool incorporated into games allowing the user to not only be trained in better means of performance, but also have a tangible means of assessing those same behaviors. This framework has been used in two games so far. The simcoach Cashier Safety game and the simcoach Selector Safety game.[4]

Carnegie Mellon Connections

Etcetera Edutainment benefited greatly from its connections with Carnegie Mellon University. A majority of Etcetera Edutainemnt's employees have graduated from the Entertainment Technology Center. The Entertainment Technology Center a department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located at the Pittsburgh Technology Center.

The ETC offers a two-year Masters of Entertainment Technology (MET) degree, jointly conferred by Carnegie Mellon University's College of Fine Arts and School of Computer Science. Students enrolled in the ETC learn interdisciplinary skills in art and technology, and are prepared for environments where artists and technologists work hand-in-hand, such as theme parks, interactive museum exhibits, website design and development, and the creation of video games.[5]

The Center was co-founded by Donald Marinelli, a Professor of Drama, and Randy Pausch, a Professor of Computer Science, in 1999.

Notable Projects

  1. simcoach Cashier Safety
  2. Alcoa Safe Dock
  3. Electrical Safety Low Voltage[6]
  4. CrowdPlay Platform[7]

References

  1. ↑ http://remakelearning.org/organization/etcetera-edutainment/
  2. ↑ http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/etcetera-edutainment
  3. ↑ http://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stories/2005/04/18/focus1.html?page=4
  4. ↑ http://www.etceteraedutainment.com/approach_simcoach.html
  5. ↑ Pausch, Randy; Don Marinelli (July 2007). "Creating a Science of Games - Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center: Combining the Left and Right Brain". Communications of the ACM 50 (7): 50–57. doi:10.1145/1272516.1272539.
  6. ↑ http://www.etceteraedutainment.com/supportdocs/ESS-onesheet-sm.pdf
  7. ↑ http://crowdplay.wordpress.com/

External links