So we did this campus-wide exhibition. People performed down here. They’re in costume and we
project just like this and you can see what’s going on. You can see what they’re seeing in the head
mount. There’s a lot of big props so there’s a guy white water rafting. [shows slides of a BVW show]
This is Ben in E.T. And yes I did tell them if they didn’t do the shot of the kids biking across the
moon I would fail him. That is a true story. And I thought I’d show you just one world and if we can
get the lights down if that’s at all possible. No ok that means no. All right. All right we’ll just do
our best then. [Shows “Hello.world” world done in the BVW class audience applauds at the end.] It
was an unusual course. With some of the most brilliant creative students from all across the
campus. It just was a joy to be involved. And they took the whole stage performance aspect of this
way too seriously [shows pictures of very strange costumes students wore]. And it became this
campus phenomenon every year. People would line up for it. It was very flattering. And it gave kids
a sense of excitement of putting on a show for people who were excited about it. And I think that
that’s one of the best things you can give somebody – the chance to show them what it feels like to
make other people get excited and happy. I mean that’s a tremendous gift. We always try to
involve the audience. Whether it was people with glow sticks or batting a beach ball around… or
driving [shows photo of audience members leaning in their seats to steer a car]. This is really cool.
This technology actually got used at the Spiderman 3 premiere in L.A. so the audience was
controlling something on the screen so that’s kind of nice. And I don’t have a class picture from
every year but I dredged all the ones that I do have and all I can say is that what a privilege and an
honor it was to teach that course for something like ten years.
And all good things come to an end. And I stopped teaching that course about a year ago. People
always ask me what was my favorite moment. I don’t know if you could have a favorite moment.
But boy there is one I’ll never forget. This was a world with I believe a roller skating ninja. And one
of the rules was that we perform these things live and they all had to really work. And the moment
it stopped working we went to your backup videotape. And this was very embarrassing. [Shows
image of Roller Ninja world presentation] So we have this ninja on stage and he’s doing this roller
skating thing and the world it did not crash gently. Whoosh. And I come out and I believe it was
Steve Audia wasn’t it? Where is he? OK where is Steve? Ah my man. Steve Audia. And talk
about quick on your feet. I say Steve I’m sorry but your world has crashed and we’re going to go to
videotape. And he pulls out his ninja sword and says I am dishonored! Whaaa! And just drops!
And so I think it’s very telling that my very favorite moment in ten years of
this high technology course was a brilliant ad lib. And then when the videotape is done and the
lights come up he’s lying there lifeless and his teammates drag him off! [laughter] It really was a
fantastic moment.
And the course was all about bonding. People used to say you know what’s going to make for a
good world? I said I can’t tell you beforehand but right before they present it I can tell you if the
world’s good just by the body language. If they’re standing close to each other the world is good.
And BVW was a pioneering course [Randy puts on vest with arrows poking out of the back] and I
won’t bore you with all the details but it wasn’t easy to do and I was given this when I stepped
down from the ETC and I think it’s emblematic. If you’re going to do anything that pioneering you
will get those arrows in the back and you just have to put up with it. I mean everything that could
go wrong did go wrong. But at the end of the day a whole lot of people had a whole lot of fun.
When you’ve had something for ten years that you hold so precious it’s the toughest thing in the
world to hand it over. And the only advice I can give you is find somebody better than you to hand
it to. And that’s what I did. There was this kid at the VR studios way back when and you didn’t have
to spend very long in Jesse Schell’s orbit to go the force is strong in this one. And one of my
greatest – my two greatest accomplishments I think for Carnegie Mellon was that I got Jessica
Hodgins and Jesse Schell to come here and join our faculty. And I was thrilled when I could hand this
over to Jesse and to no one’s surprise he has really taken it up to the next notch. And the course is
in more than good hands – it’s in better hands. But it was just one course. And then we really took
it up a notch. And we created what I would call the dream fulfillment factory. Don Marinelli and I
got together and with the university’s blessing and encouragement we made this thing out of whole
cloth that was absolutely insane. Should never have been tried. All the sane universities didn’t go
near this kind of stuff. Creating a tremendous opportunistic void. So the Entertainment Technology
Center was all about artists and technologists working in small teams to make things. It was a twoyear
professional master’s degree. And Don and I were two kindred spirits. We’re very different –
anybody who knows us knows that we are very different people. And we liked to do things in a new
way and the truth of the matter is that we are both a little uncomfortable in academia. I used to
say that I am uncomfortable as an academic because I come from a long line of people who actually
worked for a living so. [Nervous laughter] I detect nervous laughter! And I want to stress Carnegie
Mellon is the only place in the world that the ETC could have happened. By far the only place.
[Shows slide of Don Marinelli in tye-dyed shirt shades and an electric guitar sitting on a desk next
to Randy wearing nerd glasses button-up shirt staring at a laptop. Above their heads were the
labels “Right brain/Left brain”] [laughter] OK this picture was Don’s idea OK? And we like to refer
to this picture as Don Marinelli on guitar and Randy Pausch on keyboards. [laughter] But we really
did play up the left brain right brain and it worked out really well that way. [Shows slide of Don
looking intense] Don is an intense guy. And Don and I shared an office and at first it was a small
office. We shared an office for six years. You know those of you who know Don know he’s an
intense guy. And you know given my current condition somebody was asking me … this is a
terrible joke but I’m going to use it anyway. Because I know Don will forgive me. Somebody said
given your current condition have you thought about whether you’re going to go to heaven or hell?
And I said I don’t know but if I’m going to hell I’m due six years for time served! [laughter] I kid.
Sharing an office with Don was really like sharing an office with a tornado. There was just so much
energy and you never knew which trailer was next right? But you know something exciting was
going to happen. And there was so much energy and I do believe in giving credit where credit is
due. So in my typically visual way if Don and I were to split the success for the ETC he clearly gets
the lion’s share of it. [Shows image of a pie chart divided 70/30 (Don/Randy) ] He did the lion’s share
of the work ok he had the lion’s share of the ideas. It was a great teamwork. I think it was a great
yin and a yang but it was more like YIN and yang. And he deserves that credit and I give it to him
because the ETC is a wonderful place. And he’s now running it and he’s taking it global. We’ll talk
about that in a second.
Describing the ETC is really hard and I finally found a metaphor. Telling people about the ETC is like
describing Cirque du Soleil if they’ve never seen it. Sooner or later you’re going to make the
mistake. You’re going to say well it’s like a circus. And then you’re dragged into this conversation
about oh how many tigers how many lions how many trapeze acts? And that misses the whole
point. So when we say we’re a master’s degree we’re really not like any master’s degree you’ve
ever seen. Here’s the curriculum [Shows slide of ETC curriculum listing “Project Course” as the only
course each semester; audience laughs] The curriculum ended up looking like this. [shows slightly
more detailed slide]. All I want to do is visually communicate to you that you do five projects in
Building Virtual Worlds then you do three more. All of your time is spent in small teams making
stuff. None of that book learning thing. Don and I had no patience for the book learning thing. It’s
a master’s degree. They already spent four years doing book learning. By now they should have
read all the books.
The keys to success were that Carnegie Mellon gave us the reins. Completely gave us the reins. We
had no deans to report to. We reported directly to the provost which is great because the provost
is way too busy to watch you carefully. [laughter] We were given explicit license to break the mold.
It was all project based. It was intense it was fun and we took field trips! Every spring semester in
January we took all 50 students in the first year class and we’d take them out to Pixar Industrial
Light and Magic and of course when you’ve got guys like Tommy there acting as host right it’s
pretty easy to get entrée to these places. So we did things very very differently. The kind of
projects students would do we did a lot of what we’d call edutainment.
We developed a bunch of things with the Fire Department of New York a network simulator for
training firefighters using video game-ish type technology to teach people useful things. That’s not
bad. Companies did this strange thing. They put in writing we promise to hire your students. I’ve
got the EA and Activision ones here. I think there are now how many five? Drew knows I bet.
[Drew Davison head of ETC-Pittsburgh gestures with five fingers]. So there are five written
agreements. I don’t know of any other school that has this kind of written agreement with any
company. And so that’s a real statement. And these are multiple year things so they’re agreeing to
hire people for summer internships that we have not admitted yet. That’s a pretty strong statement
about the quality of the program. And Don as I said he’s now he’s crazy. In a wonderful
complimentary way. He’s doing these things where I’m like oh my god. He’s not here tonight
because he’s in Singapore because there’s going to be an ETC campus in Singapore. There’s already
on in Australia and there’s going to be on in Korea. So this is becoming a global phenomenon. So I
think this really speaks volumes about all the other universities. It’s really true that Carnegie Mellon
is the only university that can do this. We just have to do it all over the world now.
One other big success about the ETC is teaching people about feedback [puts up bar chart where
students are (anonymous) listed on a scale labeled “how easy to work with” ] -- oh I hear the
nervous laughter from the students. I had forgotten the delayed shock therapy effect of these bar
charts. When you’re taking Building Virtual Worlds every two weeks we get peer feedback. We put
that all into a big spreadsheet and at the end of the semester you had three teammates per project
five projects that’s 15 data points that’s statistically valid. And you get a bar chart telling you on a
ranking of how easy you are to work with where you stacked up against your peers. Boy that’s hard
feedback to ignore. Some still managed. [laughter] But for the most part people looked at that and
went wow I’ve got to take it up a notch. I better start thinking about what I’m saying to people in
these meetings. And that is the best gift an educator can give is to get somebody to become self
reflective.
So the ETC was wonderful but even the ETC and even as Don scales it around the globe it’s still very
labor intensive you know. It’s not Tommy one-at-a-time. It’s not a research group ten at a time.
It’s 50 or 100 at a time per campus times four campuses. But I wanted something infinitely scalable.
Scalable to the point where millions or tens of millions of people could chase their dreams with
something. And you know I guess that kind of a goal really does make me the Mad Hatter. [Puts on
a Mad Hatter’s green top hat]. So Alice is a project that we worked on for a long long time. It’s a
novel way to teach computer programming. Kids make movies and games. The head fake – again
we’re back to the head fakes. The best way to teach somebody something is to have them think
they’re learning something else. I’ve done it my whole career. And the head fake here is that
they’re learning to program but they just think they’re making movies and video games. This thing
has already been downloaded well over a million times. There are eight textbooks that have been
written about it. Ten percent of U.S. colleges are using it now. And it’s not the good stuff yet. The
good stuff is coming in the next version. I like Moses get to see the promised land but I won’t get
to set foot in it. And that’s OK because I can see it. And the vision is clear. Millions of kids having
fun while learning something hard. That’s pretty cool. I can deal with that as a legacy. The next
version’s going to come out in 2008. It’s going to be teaching the Java language if you want them to
know they’re learning Java. Otherwise they’ll just think that they’re writing movie scripts. And
we’re getting the characters from the bestselling PC video game in history The Sims. And this is
already working in the lab so there’s no real technological risk. I don’t have time to thank and
mention everybody in the Alice team but I just want to say that Dennis Cosgrove is going to be
building this has been building this. He is the designer. This is his baby. And for those of you who
are wondering well in some number of months who should I be emailing about the Alice project
where’s Wanda Dann? Oh there you are. Stand up let them all see you. Everybody say Hi Wanda.
Audience:
Hi Wanda.
Randy Pausch:
Send her the email. And I’ll talk a little bit more about Caitlin Kelleher but she’s graduated with her
Ph.D. and she’s at Washington University and she’s going to be taking this up a notch and going to
middle schools with it. So grand vision and to the extent that you can live on in something I will
live on in Alice.
All right so now the third part of the talk. Lessons learned. We’ve talked about my dreams. We’ve
talked about helping other people enable their dreams. Somewhere along the way there’s got to be
some aspect of what lets you get to achieve your dreams. First one is the rule of parents mentors
and students. I was blessed to have been born to two incredible people. This is my mother on her
70th birthday. [Shows slide of Randy’s mom driving a race car on an amusement park race course]
[laughter] I am back here. I have just been lapped. [laughter] This is my dad riding a roller coaster
on his 80th birthday. [Shows slide of dad] And he points out that he’s not only brave he’s talented
because he did win that big bear the same day. My dad was so full of life anything with him was an
adventure. [Shows picture of his Dad holding a brown paper bag.] I don’t know what’s in that bag
but I know it’s cool. My dad dressed up as Santa Claus but he also did very very significant things
to help lots of people. This is a dormitory in Thailand that my mom and dad underwrote. And every
year about 30 students get to go to school who wouldn’t have otherwise. This is something my wife
and I have also been involved in heavily. And these are the kind of things that I think everybody
ought to be doing. Helping others.
But the best story I have about my dad – unfortunately my dad passed away a little over a year ago
– and when we were going through his things he had fought in World War II in the Battle of the
Bulge and when we were going through his things we found out he had been awarded the Bronze
Star for Valor. My mom didn’t know it. In 50 years of marriage it had just never come up.
My mom. [Shows picture of Randy as a young child pulling his Mom’s hair]. Mothers are people
who love even when you pull their hair. And I have two great mom stories. When I was here
studying to get my Ph.D. and I was taking something called the theory qualifier which I can
definitively say is the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy. [laughter] And I was
complaining to my mother about how hard this test was and how awful it was and she just leaned
over and she patted me on the arm and she said we know how you feel honey and remember when
your father was your age he was fighting the Germans. [laugher] After I got my Ph.D. my mother
took great relish in introducing me as this is my son he’s a doctor but not the kind that helps people.
[laughter] These slides are a little bit dark [meaning “hard to see”] but when I was in high school I
decided to paint my bedroom. [shows slides of bedroom] I always wanted a submarine and an
elevator. And the great thing about this [shows slide of quadratic formula painted on wall]
[interrupted by laughter] – what can I say? And the great thing about this is they let me do it. And
they didn’t get upset about it. And it’s still there. If you go to my parent’s house it’s still there. And
anybody who is out there who is a parent if your kids want to paint their bedroom as a favor to me
let them do it. It’ll be OK. Don’t worry about resale value on the house.
Other people who help us besides our parents: our teachers our mentors our friends our
colleagues. God what is there to say about Andy Van Dam? When I was a freshman at Brown he
was on leave. And all I heard about was this Andy Van Dam. He was like a mythical creature. Like a
centaur but like a really pissed off centaur. And everybody was like really sad that he was gone but
kind of more relaxed? And I found out why. Because I started working for Andy. I was a teaching
assistant for him as a sophomore. And I was quite an arrogant young man. And I came in to some
office hours and of course it was nine o’clock at night and Andy was there at office hours which is
your first clue as to what kind of professor he was. And I come bounding in and you know I’m just
I’m going to save the world. There’re all these kids waiting for help da da da da da da da da da
da. And afterwards Andy literally Dutch-uncled – he’s Dutch right? He Dutch-uncled me. And he
put his arm around my shoulders and we went for a little walk and he said Randy it’s such a shame
that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to
accomplish in life. What a hell of a way to word “you’re being a jerk.” [laughter] Right? He doesn’t
say you’re a jerk. He says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it’s going
to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish.
When I got to know Andy better the beatings became more direct but. [laughter] I could tell you
Andy stories for a month but the one I will tell you is that when it came time to start thinking about
what to do about graduating from Brown it had never occurred to me in a million years to go to
graduate school. Just out of my imagination. It wasn’t the kind of thing people from my family did.
We got say what do you call them? …. jobs. And Andy said no don’t go do that. Go get a Ph.D.
Become a professor. And I said why? And he said because you’re such a good salesman that any
company that gets you is going to use you as a salesman. And you might as well be selling
something worthwhile like education. [long pause looks directly at Andy van Dam] Thanks.
Andy was my first boss so to speak. I was lucky enough to have a lot of bosses. [shows slide of
various bosses] That red circle is way off. Al is over here. [laughter] I don’t know what the hell
happened there. He’s probably watching this on the webcast going my god he’s targeting and he
still can’t aim! [laughter] I don’t want to say much about the great bosses I’ve had except that they
were great. And I know a lot of people in the world that have had bad bosses and I haven’t had to
endure that experience and I’m very grateful to all the people that I ever had to have worked for.
They have just been incredible.
But it’s not just our bosses we learn from our students. I think the best head fake of all time comes
from Caitlin Kelleher. Excuse me Doctor Caitlin Kelleher who just finished up here and

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关键词:dreams  childhood  your  achieving  really