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While some college students ask for video games for Christmas, �԰����� students make their own. For their final projects, students in professor Matthew Hibbs’s Game Development course teamed up with students from professor Brian Bondari’s electronic music course to create a game with an original soundtrack.

This year, students made a two-dimensional game composed of six minigames, each with its own soundtrack loosely based on a short melody composed by Bondari. Ray Sparks ’20 had the unique advantage of working on both sides of the project at once.

“It was really cool for both of my final projects to come together like they did,” Sparks says. “It was also nice because, since I started the game first, I got to choose exactly how it sounded.”

Sparks, a computer science major who also works in �԰�����’s IT department, says that STEM students get the chance to be creative more often than some may think. “Computer science is super varied in its classes so there’s a little bit of everything we can do,” he says.

Bondari and Hibbs came up with the idea of collaboration between their classes three years ago. “Dr. Hibbs and I were on the faculty senate together, and we were just having lunch one day,” Bondari says. “He said something like, ‘Don’t you teach an electronic music class?’ It was like a ‘eureka’ moment.” Bondari sees this kind of opportunity for collaboration as a �԰����� staple. “�԰����� likes to call them creative collisions,” he says. “This is probably the most popular one. It’s been a hit ever since. We can work together to create a game with original music.”