Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch, a 46-year-old computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, a pioneer in virtual reality, a Disney Imagineer, an innovative teacher, and the co-founder of the best video game school in the world, , delivers one last lecture entitled “How to Live Your Childhood Dreams” on his life’s journey and lessons, as he expects to live for just a few more months from pancreatic cancer.

(words from khoapham.wordpress.com)

some choice quotes from the lecture:
- “And as you get older, you may find that “enabling the dreams of others” thing is even more fun.”

- “…so one of the expressions I learned at Electronic Arts, which I love, which pertains to this, is
experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted“.

- [flashing up rejection letters] “…the brick walls are here for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the
people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people."


Although its not 100% about interactive media it does have some cool stuff in it about virtual reality and the vitrual reality peice he shows about creating a world and it not wanting to be shut down is great.

He also mentions Alice an educational software that teaches students computer programing in a 3d enviroment.

"In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course."
from http://alice.org