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Whaaat!? Festival Brings Experimental Gaming Goodness to ATLAS

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 20:05:21 +0000

Whaaat!? Festival Brings Experimental Gaming Goodness to ATLAS Michael Kwolek Wed, 10/15/2025 - 14:05

Michael Kwolek

Attending Whaaat!? Festival

Saturday, October 25, 2025
9am - 5pm

Roser ATLAS Center
1125 18th St., Boulder, CO

All ages (ideal for 16+)

Regular entry: $16; VIP & pay-what-you-can option available!

Info + Tickets

Experimental video games, arcade classics, mini golf, student-designed creations, a riff on Taskmaster and more—Sounds like Whaaat!? Festival time again.

Coming Saturday, October 25th, 2025 (9am - 5pm), in the Roser ATLAS Center, Whaaat!? Festival is a celebration of weird games and experimental play for anyone interested in exploring the frontiers of digital and physical game design. Plus, all-you-can-eat breakfast cereal!

We spoke with festival organizer and associate teaching professor, Danny Rankin, about what to expect from this year’s fest.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What is the Whaaat!? Festival all about?

It's a weird cereal-fueled arcade fest with different speakers, events, workshops, games, alternative controllers and experimental interactive art.

We started it eight years ago because we felt there's so much more in the world of games and play beyond conventional industry ideas.

Hang out for a day and play—that's the thing.

Give us a little bit of your background and why this is important to you.

I've worked in graphic design and fabrication and art design for a long time, and I came to grad school here.

I got really into games because I thought it was fun to see people at play. So I started making alternative control games that we showed at festivals around the world, as well as board games.

I've played video games my whole life, but I didn't realize just how cool and weird and exploratory and artistic they can get. So for me, I have always wanted to see more unusual forms of play.

I teach classes at ATLAS on game design and on alternative interfaces and weird controllers. That's a big part of what I do as director of the Whaaat!? Lab, which is a creative studio space for designing interesting experimental games and interactions.

What is the theme for this year’s festival?

This year the theme is Summer Camp, even though it's October. We're theming all of the arcades around weird cabin vibes and nature games. There's also a gambling cabin [note: not real gambling!] and a creature cabin.

The Media Archeology Lab will bring a bunch of old game consoles and hardware that people can play.

We're building miniature golf holes, running games of foursquare and playing with a giant rainbow parachute. And we'll also run a game that we're calling “Scoutmaster” as a live conversation about that work, while also torturing people through various menial tasks. It's like the game show Taskmaster, except at scout camp.

We just decided to go a little wild this year. More embodied activities, less sitting and listening to somebody talk.

Sounds like the festival will take over the Roser ATLAS Center.

We'll use a lot of the building for exploration, but we'll be running games outside, weather dependent. We might be running some stuff out there in the elevator and the roof—all over the building and in the Black Box Experimental Studio.

Who should come to Whaaat!? Festival?

Anybody who likes to have fun and play. You don't even have to be a lover of video games, although we'll have a lot of really cool video games on display. But we also just think about play as a really big, exciting thing. You can get a lot of people to do fun experiments with that.

And if you like merit badges, we're going to have a bunch you can earn this year. If you like gamifying your life into a series of bizarre achievements, like whether you got attacked by a person in a bear suit at a festival, there's a merit badge for that.

So it’s much more than video games.

Yeah, I think that we can think about video games as this one-sided forum where you are meant to be entertained or immersed. I love that about games, but we're also interested in video games that are humorous or provocative or really experimental and strange. Games that explore play as an interactive art form, things that you wouldn't even conventionally call a game—maybe it's a digital experiment.

A lot of game industry people have come to the festival over the years. I try to expand their imagination of what's possible because we spend most of our time not playing any kind of big studio, conventional, successful games. People play those at home and don't need to come to a festival to do that.

We curate a selection we hope will blow people's minds around what video games can do.

Are there special guests?

We're inviting some artists from out of town. One of my longtime collaborators and co-founder of the Whaaat!? Festival, Matt Bethancourt, is coming in.

Artists from around CU and grad students from the Creative Technology & Design program are all working on this thing we're calling It Came From Camp Whaaat!? It’s a one-week game jam where we're creating a bunch of in-place experiments in the building, including miniature golf holes and experimental controllers for games that are going to be showcased.

Why is ATLAS the right venue for the festival?

ATLAS is really interested in the fusion between digital and physical environments. So anywhere you're creating things with computers, but are also interested in how people physically show up and experience those things, that's a big part of our DNA.

ATLAS is all about radical creativity and invention. And I think that applies to games.

Cereal-fueled celebration draws gamers of all ages to explore the frontiers of game design.

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ATLAS students pair design and engineering to improve access to nature

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:46:24 +0000

ATLAS students pair design and engineering to improve access to nature Michael Kwolek Tue, 06/10/2025 - 09:46

Creative Technology & Design master's students developed a system to help birdwatchers with mobility challenges continue to participate in this popular pastime.

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CU Boulder further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 20:03:22 +0000

CU Boulder further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program Michael Kwolek Wed, 04/16/2025 - 14:03

CU Boulder ranks number 11 among public university peers for its engineering graduate programs according to U.S. News and World Report Best Graduate Schools rankings for 2025-26.

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T9 Hacks challenges students to invent healthcare solutions

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 17:37:15 +0000

T9 Hacks challenges students to invent healthcare solutions Michael Kwolek Tue, 02/11/2025 - 10:37

Michael Kwolek

For many of us, healthcare is top-of-mind. The healthcare industry offers major opportunities for applying technology to improve access, care and outcomes. Now CU Boulder students can design solutions of their own.

T9 Hacks, a student-led organization at ATLAS, creates an annual opportunity for newcomers to participate in a hackathon aimed at addressing timely and relevant challenges. The hackathon format empowers participants to work together to rapidly conceive, design and develop a response to a specific prompt.

As a key source for interdisciplinary research and academics across campus, the ATLAS Institute is the perfect place to host T9 Hacks each year. Student teams are encouraged to leverage their technical skills and express their creativity in exploring solutions.

Kira Velez, T9 Hacks president, notes, “Our goal is for students to walk away with not only new technical skills but also a sense of confidence in their ability to solve real-world problems. We hope they learn the value of collaboration, creativity, and pushing beyond their comfort zones to bring ideas to life.”

The 24-hour hackathon, sponsored by Medtronic and ATLAS, starts on Friday, February 14, and runs through the following afternoon.

This year, teams will design and build solutions focused around healthcare, choosing from three categories: AI in health, cybersecurity and patient safety.

Velez explains, “Healthcare is a field where technology has the power to make a real difference in people’s lives. We wanted to challenge participants to think critically about how they can use their skills to improve patient care, accessibility, and innovation in the medical space. Given the increasing role of tech in healthcare, we felt this theme would be both timely and impactful.”

The T9 Hacks mission is to “create a welcoming and safe place for women and traditionally underrepresented students to explore hackathons” to bolster broader participation in hacking culture, but is open to all CU students. It’s simple: the more creative minds on a problem, the likelier we are to uncover transformational solutions.

“T9 Hacks is more than just a hackathon—it’s a space designed to be inclusive and welcoming, especially for those underrepresented in tech. We focus on creating a supportive environment where participants of all skill levels can collaborate, learn, and build something meaningful.”

To learn more and register for this year’s hackathon, visit the T9 Hacks website.

T9 Hacks Hackathon
February 14-15, 2025
Check-in starts at 4:30pm on Friday, 2/14

Event is free and includes food, swag & prizes!

The 2025 T9 Hacks hackathon empowers students to work together over 24 hours to tackle a pressing design challenge. This year’s event, sponsored by Medtronic and the ATLAS Institute, focuses on healthcare in three tracks: AI in health, cybersecurity, and patient safety. Open to all, T9 Hacks aims to expand the audience for hackathons and bring a broader set of creative minds together to solve problems.

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Creative Technology and Design master’s students collaborate with City of Denver to enhance civic engagement

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 17:28:39 +0000

Creative Technology and Design master’s students collaborate with City of Denver to enhance civic engagement Michael Kwolek Mon, 12/16/2024 - 10:28

Michael Kwolek

Building civic pride and engagement are essential for cities to thrive. This semester, teams of Creative Technology and Design (CTD) master’s students developed proposals in coordination with the City of Denver aiming to do just that.

The CTD program engages students in pursuing practical solutions to real-world design challenges by blending behavioral insights, technology, branding and marketing, and physical objects. This comprehensive approach can yield more meaningful outcomes than one-off fixes are often able to achieve.

Indeed, while CTD students pursue unique paths focusing on creative industries, social impact or performance technology, they also work on cross-disciplinary team projects that push their boundaries and prepare them to succeed in careers across many industries.

Many methods to design
This year’s cohort had the opportunity to collaborate with the City of Denver to propose solutions for two initiatives as part of Design Methods, a foundational class all CTD students complete.

By nature, good design has no one right approach. Design Methods, taught by Derek Friday and John Breznicky, familiarizes students with many different ways to address design prompts, including the concepts of deliberate observation (e.g. cultural probes, ethnography); “problem finding” and “design thinking”; “wicked problems”; iterative design; and alternative generation and assessment.

The class culminates with month-long final projects in which teams collaborate on proposals to address real-life design needs. This semester, four teams of CTD master’s students worked on projects in partnership with the Denver Mayor’s Office to develop solutions to support two remarkable initiatives.

They delivered final presentations in ATLAS’s B2 Black Box Experimental Studio. In attendance were representatives from the City of Denver, including First Lady Johnston, and Tran Nguyen-Wills, Deputy Outreach Director, along with Josh Wills, Creative Director & Partner at Consume & Create. Each team’s members brought a variety of skills, talents and interests to their groups and collectively they proposed a series of multidisciplinary solutions.

Friday noted, “[The teams] were able to generate solid ideas based on the brief and using the process that we taught them during the semester with the caveat that [the process of] developing your own method for problem solving continues to evolve throughout your entire creative process… They were pros and we were really, really proud.”

Here is some of what the teams presented:

Little Saigon / Saigon Azteca

Team 1 - Abena Gyimah, Julia McKeag, Harsita Rajendren, Shreya Pradeep Sekar, Justin Chan, Lavan Kumar Baskaran, Mythiresh Gajendra Babu
Team 2 - Sylvia Robles, Colin Egge, Jax Whitham, Jacy Ashford, Ayesha Rawal, Noah Reardon
Team 3 - Scott Ehrlich, Eli Skelly, Clayton Hester, Shraddha Shinde, Nick Barcalow, Arjun Ramachandran

Little Saigon Denver is a vibrant cultural enclave known for its rich Vietnamese heritage and community dating back over 40 years, as well as a growing Hispanic community. The City of Denver has identified opportunities to enhance cultural preservation, spark economic development and engage the community in this district.

City designers presented this strategy: “Exploring the intersectionality of the AAPI and Latino/Indigenous cultures, including music, dance, and ceremonies, will result in a compelling brand that amplifies the rich heritage of the communities that call this Cultural District home.”

Three teams proposed comprehensive design solutions incorporating branding (logos, color palettes, typography) and digital solutions (web and mobile integrations) along with physical interventions ranging from modular planters to signage to walkability improvements.

In lieu of an ornamental archway over a busy thoroughfare to mark the neighborhood, one team proposed a pedestrian bridge incorporating cultural design elements, with the aim to improve accessibility and safety. This combination of aesthetic enhancement and cultural relevance combined with practical, human-scale problem-solving powered by technology exemplifies what makes the CTD program special.

Josh Will, who developed the project briefs the students worked from, noted in his feedback to one team, “Given the community’s curb appeal—or lack thereof—it’s a very vibrant district and community, and you have done a great job of taking everything that exists on the inside. When you go into a restaurant or any of the businesses, the community is very welcoming and energetic, uplifting, bright and vibrant. And throughout your entire visualization and also the physical planters and archways—you’ve taken what exists inside and brought it outside.”

Give5 Mile High
Team: Aaron Neyer, Elizabeth Saunders, Pavan Dayal, Shawn Duncan Jr., Stephanie Babb

Give5 Mile High is a citywide volunteer initiative led by First Lady of Denver Courtney Johnston and the Mayor’s Office outreach team. This program empowers Denverites to come together to strengthen the community through collective service.

The City of Denver’s design team identified two key needs to ensure Give5 Mile High success:

A technology solution to support and connect volunteers, organizations and local businesses.
A marketing campaign to raise awareness among key stakeholders.

The student team presented a detailed mock-up of a mobile app designed to simplify connectivity and improve participation in Give5 Mile High. They also built a comprehensive brand and marketing strategy incorporating social media and local influencers to boost program awareness and engagement.

In her feedback to the team, First Lady Johnston said, “This is exactly what we were hoping [the team] would achieve. It made sense to think this should be a very user-friendly app that invites people to participate, and you all did it. This is incredible. I love that there are lots of things we didn’t even think about that you can do.”

Mayor Johnston was able to view the presentation remotely and added, “What I love about it is that it fundamentally understands and accelerates the two major principles of the project. One—how to make it so much easier for folks to sign up—the ease of sign-up is so powerful that the app makes possible. The second is the idea that the service is an act of community building. It is a way in which you serve with other people that binds you together, and this seamlessly connects you to other people.”

Additional project presentations
Aside from the work with the City of Denver, two more student teams presented projects combining engineering, design, data and art. Take a look:

Climate Threads
Team: Sara Runkel, Robyn Marowitz, Caitlin Littlejohn, Kate Rooney

Climate Threads aims to raise awareness about air quality and its impact on public health. Through data visualization and textile design, invisible disparities in air quality become visible and tangible. Explore the data on the project website.

Confluence
Team: Abe Homer, Shalimar Alvarado Cruz Hebbeler, Abhinav Mehrotra, Alexander LaFontaine, Cambria Klinger

Confluence is an interactive, immersive experience that explores the artistry of water. The dynamic fluid simulation can be interacted with by tilting a cairn on all four axes. Laser-cut and built using chipboard, the cairn represents the confluence of both the digital and physical world. The installation was completed with the use of projection, spatial audio, and soft ambient lighting for a peaceful and immersive experience. Learn more on the project website.

Designing through radical creativity and inclusion
Gordon Müller-Seitz, guest researcher and Chair of Strategy, Innovation and Cooperation at the �Թ�� of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) in Germany, provided students support and guidance throughout the semester. In addressing attendees, he summed up the ATLAS program by saying, “I really appreciated that you live up to your motto that you strive for radical creativity. But it is not only radical creativity—it is also this radical inclusiveness.”

Learn more about the Creative Technology and Design master’s program

Students proposed design solutions to bolster community interaction and pride in support of the Little Saigon neighborhood and local volunteering initiative, Give5 Mile High.

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Spring 2023 ATLAS Student Awards

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 16:15:31 +0000

Spring 2023 ATLAS Student Awards Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/27/2023 - 10:15

Graduating in May 2023 with degrees in Creative Technology and Design, these graduate and undergraduate students listed are recognized for exceptional accomplishments, having demonstrated initiative in their academic and extracurricular activities, completing outstanding research or creative projects, or contributing significantly to the ATLAS community.

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ATLAS Expo: 70+ creative technology and design projects to surprise and delight

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 23:51:10 +0000

ATLAS Expo: 70+ creative technology and design projects to surprise and delight Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/25/2022 - 17:51

If you go

Who: Everyone and anyone

What: ATLAS Expo

When: Thursday, April 28, 2022, 4–6p.m.

Where: Roser ATLAS Center, 1125 18th St., Boulder

Cost: Free!

Holographic drumming partners, video projectors carried by drones, motion-activated video pinball, an app to help roommates manage household chores: These are just a few of the projects on display this Thursday during ATLAS Expo.

On hiatus for the last two years, this popular annual event is a richly varied showcase of projects by graduate and undergraduate College of Engineering students studying creative technology and design.

This year features more than 70 projects, variously designed to engage, delight, puzzle and inspire. Some are purely design-oriented; others incorporate virtual and augmented reality, wearable technologies, interaction design, robotics, information technology for development and more.

"Our classes are almost all project-based and we always push students to think outside the box," says Jill Dupré, associate director of ATLAS. "Expo features some of the best work from the past year. It's a blast! For anyone whose ever been curious about ATLAS, this is a great time to visit."

The two-hour event kicks off at 4 p.m. Thursday and is open to all.

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ATLAS students take home HackCU's top awards

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 22:13:49 +0000

ATLAS students take home HackCU's top awards Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/04/2022 - 16:13

For the second year running, Creative Technology and Design students won first place at the largest university hackathon in the Rocky Mountain region, HackCU, held this year March 5-6 on the CU Boulder campus. Another student, whose two majors include CTD and computer science, took second place this year as the sole member of his team.

Océane Andreis (MS-CTD), Katherine Tran (BS-CTD), Sangati Shah (engineering and business, CTD minor) and Patricia Chin (computer science, minoring in CTD and business) together won first prize overall, as well as the social impact prize, for their project TL-DR, which helps users understand what they consent to when agreeing to data privacy terms and conditions. The team of four formed after working together as organizers of the ATLAS Institute’s 2022 T9Hacks, a hackathon that aims to attract women and other groups typically underrepresented at such events. Michał Bodzianowski (majoring in computer science and CTD, with a business minor) won second prize overall for his solo invention, Creatle, a web-based game engine/platform where technical novices can create their own remixes of the classic Wordle game. Creatle also won the Best Game and Entertainment Prize.

Last year, CTD undergraduate students Mason Moran and Colin Soguero, working alongside Colin's brother, Luke Soguero (computer science), took first prize at HackCU for their project, ChessLens, an augmented reality application that helps chess players improve their game.

HackCU is an annual invention marathon where participants build and share their creations in just 24 hours. This year there were 29 submissions from 96 participants. The TL-DR team and Bodzianowski won electronics and other prizes.

All of this year's ATLAS winners said that participating in T9Hacks was a key component of their success.

“We felt inspired by the T9Hacks participants who worked incredibly hard, and we wanted to work just as hard,” Andreis said.

Inspired by others

Bodzianowski said his Creatle invention was inspired by T9Hack’s winning entry, Complexify, a Worldle-like game platform.

“Creatle is my attempt to create a platform for people to create, share and play their own remixes of the classic Wordle format with minimum effort,” he said.

But things did not go well at first for Bodzianowski. First he arrived an hour late to the hackathon; then at 3 a.m. he decided to scrap the experimental technologies he was using and restart his project. He almost quit, he said, but then pivoted to the technologies he used during the 2022 T9Hacks hackathon.

“With the help of a copious amount of caffeine, I was able to get a working prototype of Creatle finished just in time for judging,” he said.

At that point the actual "create" part of Creatle wasn't working— instead Bodzianowski showed the judges how he made the games through a development database and focused on the technical and design aspects of the project.

TL-DR allows users to take control of their data by encouraging them to stay informed about their data privacy. The solution is two-pronged: first a Google Chrome extension displays the terms and conditions of a viewed platform in short digestible bullet points. There’s also a website that helps users visualize the data that they willingly provide when blindly agreeing to website terms and conditions.

All of TL-DR’s team members had completed ethics classes where data privacy was covered, such as the "Meaning of Information Technology." Those ATLAS classes helped inspire their project idea, Tran said.

“Most people accept the lack of data privacy as the price to pay for free services,” she said. “Having learned about the extensive information that huge technology companies collect and seeing how invasive and harmful it can be, we felt motivated to respond to this topic.”

Everyone on the TL-DR team played to their strengths, Shah said. Andreis coded the Chrome extension and worked alongside Tran on the website. Chin prototyped the team’s visuals while Shah pulled together the sample data and reviewed terms and conditions.

“In the midst of all the coding and designing, we had lots of fun eating the food, attending the side events, and, of course, just enjoying each others’ company—like any other team would,” Tran said.

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Andrea Fautheree Márquez's project featured in Museum of Boulder's Voces Vivas

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 23:28:12 +0000

Andrea Fautheree Márquez's project featured in Museum of Boulder's Voces Vivas Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/22/2022 - 17:28

[video:https://vimeo.com/612991101]

If you go

Who: Everyone

What: Voces Vivas: Stories from the Latino Community in Boulder County, Past and Present

When: Through February 26, 2023; 9-5 p.m.; closed Tuesdays

Where: Museum of Boulder, 2205 Broadway, Boulder

Cost: Adults – $10.00; Seniors – $8.00; College Students – $8.00; Youth (5-17) – $8.00 Under 5 – Free Museum of Boulder Members – Free

Purchase tickets online

Museum of Boulder’s new exhibit, Voces Vivas: Stories from the Latino Community in Boulder County, Past and Present features Andrea Fautheree Márquez's thesis project, "Chicana Light," which explores the Chicano civil rights movement in Colorado. Fautheree Márquez, a Creative Industries master's student, used projection mapping to create the immersive, multimedia installation of three videos playing on their own loops.

Chicana Light also explores Fautheree Márquez's identity, political awakening and sense of pride as a Chicana woman.

Voces Vivas honors the early Boulder County Latino/a/x/e families and their histories to date. The exhibit, which is in partnership with the Latino History Project and �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder's Ethnic Studies Department, builds upon the work local Latinos have been doing to preserve and share their stories.

Voces Vivas opened Feb 26 and runs through Feb 26, 2023. The exhibit was made possible with financial support from the Boulder Arts Commission, the Community Foundation of Boulder County, the Dodge Family Fund, Terrapin Care Station and the Horning Family.

More information about Fautheree Márquez's project.

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Spring 2021 ATLAS Student Awards

Anonymous — Tue, 04 May 2021 19:29:06 +0000

Spring 2021 ATLAS Student Awards Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/04/2021 - 13:29

Graduating in May 2021 with degrees in Creative Technology and Design, the graduate and undergraduate students listed below are recognized for exceptional accomplishments, having demonstrated initiative in their academic and extracurricular activities, completing outstanding research or creative projects, or contributing significantly to the ATLAS community.

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