This year’s Orange Shirt Day programming at UVic will take place from September 27-29. The recent discovery of hundreds of unreported graves at former residential schools has made this year’s activities even more meaningful and significant.

UVic will continue to offer a blend of face-to-face and online instruction for the spring term. We are looking at ways to safely open up the campus more while keeping aligned with public health guidelines.

English students in a fifth-year digital literary studies course turned to literature and DIY culture for inspiration to create video games as part of their class. They created two indie games: a campus-based locative app for mobile phones and a 2-D children’s game.

Game programming contests drive student interest, experience and skill—and are putting UVic on the map in the programming world On Saturday, Feb. 20, UVic played host to a virtual battle, attended by over 300 students and developers wanting to test their artificial intelligence programming skills. It was the third annual BattleSnake competition. In the classic arcade game Snake, a player maneuvers a growing “snake” around the computer screen. As the snake grows in size, it becomes more difficult for the player to avoid making the snake run into itself. BattleSnake builds on this simple game: as the snake eats apples, it grows in size. Run into a wall, your own tail, or another snake’s tail and it’s game over. But there’s a competitive aspect to this version: run head-on into another player’s snake and the longer one consumes the shorter one.

UVic’s EcoCAR 2 team of engineering students are not just getting hands-on experience while they study, they’re getting their hands dirty. Since April 2011, close to 40 students in mechanical, electrical, computer and software engineering, and busin…