Abstract
Students aspiring to careers in the themed entertainment and attractions industry have few formal options to learn and demonstrate skills and knowledge specific to the industry. Students have shown initiative in developing extracurricular activities, and industry has reached out to offer “next generation” programs and internships. It still remains problematic for industry employers to select the best qualified students from a large pool of aspirants and for motivated candidates to stand out as highly qualified for these opportunities. The Ryerson Invitational Thrill Design Competition (RITDC) was developed to address this problem. RITDC provides learning experiences and performance evaluation with not only completion as an indicator of accomplishment, but concurrent interactive evaluation by judges from industry. As such, although the competition is formally an extracurricular activity, it functions as stopgap curriculum. This paper describes the origin and evolution of the competition and the challenges it has encountered, and the response from participants and industry.
International Competition as Stopgap Curriculum: Case Study of Ryerson Invitational Thrill Design Competition
Students aspiring to careers in the themed entertainment and attractions industry have few formal options to learn and demonstrate skills and knowledge specific to the industry. Students have shown initiative in developing extracurricular activities, and industry has reached out to offer “next generation” programs and internships. It still remains problematic for industry employers to select the best qualified students from a large pool of aspirants and for motivated candidates to stand out as highly qualified for these opportunities. The Ryerson Invitational Thrill Design Competition (RITDC) was developed to address this problem. RITDC provides learning experiences and performance evaluation with not only completion as an indicator of accomplishment, but concurrent interactive evaluation by judges from industry. As such, although the competition is formally an extracurricular activity, it functions as stopgap curriculum. This paper describes the origin and evolution of the competition and the challenges it has encountered, and the response from participants and industry.