195. The Impact of Game Development (LIVE Lab)
9/26/2025
You are in for a treat! Do you have someone in your life that is interested in video games or game development? Claire talks with Aaron Thibault, the director of The LIVE Lab which is a research lab at Texas A&M University in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts where students learn to create interactive learning experiences while getting real industry experience. Hear his story along with the impact that game-based learning can have on learning as well as some ways you as a teacher can bring LIVE Lab projects to your classroom.
Aaron Thibault, Texas A&M University LIVE Lab Director
About Aaron Thibault, LIVE Lab Director: Aaron Thibault is a game developer, educator and researcher who focuses on the innovation of game-based technologies that support learning and deep representations of people, environments and complex interactive scenarios. He was a key leader for the mega-franchise “Borderlands,” developed retention techniques and story pipelines for the first massive multiplayer game “Ultima Online,” and created the Digital Warrior game-based learning platform for the US Army as part of a joint TAMU-UT Austin “UXXI” digital transformation initiative. He organized and advised foundational research at his Digital Media CoLab including rtNEAT, a breakthrough real-time evolutionary neural network technique invented by Ken Stanley and an example of a core research invention that can only occur with support of a lab-based game development team. Aaron also helped start and managed the world’s first graduate degree program for games, The Guildhall at SMU, and is an ACM SIGGRAPH Pioneer and former IEEE virtual reality program chair.
About Texas A&M’s LIVE Lab: The LIVE Lab is a research lab at Texas A&M University in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts where students learn to create interactive learning experiences while getting real industry experience. With the help of subject matter experts and instructional designers, students collaborate to make high-quality digital learning experiences, touching on every aspect of professional development including design, concept art, 3D modeling, development and management.
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