Promoting Information Technology Through Educational Simulations

Information technology has become an increasing popular major offered by various universities, and provides the student with notable flexibility regarding courses as there are multiple career paths to suit the person’s specific technical interests. However, the methods universities use to promote their majors, including IT, are not as effective as it needs to be. The mediums currently used are mostly comprised of brochures, flyers, a single web page from the university’s entire website, and some communication with advisors, among others. This can be an issue for many readers as the information is often brief, providing only summaries of what can be expected, and ambiguous statistics that may not accurately or completely reflect the prospects of graduates looking to make a living the rest of their adult lives. This could cause some students to choose a major that may not be their best fit, and changing majors later will be very costly and delay graduation by one or more years. Therefore, the advocation of majors will have be rethought. The IT major offered at ASU is a perfect opportunity to determine whether a major can be promoted through a different approach with a senior capstone project involving a website. This Barrett creative project will act as a subset of the capstone project that will explore an attempt at introducing in interactive element to the website that allows prospective students to get a brief introduction to the computer networking aspect of IT, which includes a real world introductory game, along with more detailed exercises if the user is interested.