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And so those are my childhood dreams. And that’s pretty good. I felt good about that. So then the
question becomes, how can I enable the childhood dreams of others. And again, boy am I glad I
became a professor. What better place to enable childhood dreams? Eh, maybe working at EA, I
don’t know. That’d probably be a good close second. And this started in a very concrete realization
that I could do this, because a young man named Tommy Burnett, when I was at the University of
Virginia, came to me, was interested in joining my research group. And we talked about it, and he
said, oh, and I have a childhood dream. It gets pretty easy to recognize them when they tell you.
And I said, yes, Tommy, what is your childhood dream? He said, I want to work on the next Star
Wars film. Now you got to remember the timing on this. Where is Tommy, Tommy is here today.
What year would this have been? Your sophomore year.

Tommy:

It was around ’93.

Randy Pausch:

Are you breaking anything back there young man? OK, all right, so in 1993. And I said to Tommy,
you know they’re probably not going to make those next movies. [laughter] And he said, no, THEY
ARE. And Tommy worked with me for a number of years as an undergraduate and then as a staff
member, and then I moved to Carnegie Mellon, every single member of my team came from Virginia
to Carnegie Mellon except for Tommy because he got a better offer. And he did indeed work on all
three of those films. And then I said, well that’s nice, but you know, one at a time is kind of
inefficient. And people who know me know that I’m an efficiency freak. So I said, can I do this in
mass? Can I get people turned in such a way that they can be turned onto their childhood dreams?
And I created a course, I came to Carnegie Mellon and I created a course called Building Virtual
Worlds. It’s a very simple course. How many people here have ever been to any of the shows?
[Some people from audience raise hands] OK, so some of you have an idea. For those of you who
don’t, the course is very simple. There are 50 students drawn from all the different departments of
the university. There are randomly chosen teams, four people per team, and they change every
project. A project only lasts two weeks, so you do something, you make something, you show
something, then I shuffle the teams, you get three new playmates and you do it again. And it’s
every two weeks, and so you get five projects during the semester. The first year we taught this
course, it is impossible to describe how much of a tiger by the tail we had. I was just running the
course because I wanted to see if we could do it. We had just learned how to do texture mapping
on 3D graphics, and we could make stuff that looked half decent. But you know, we were running
on really weak computers, by current standards. But I said I’ll give it a try. And at my new university
[Carnegie Mellon] I made a couple of phone calls, and I said I want to cross-list this course to get all
these other people. And within 24 hours it was cross-listed in five departments. I love this
university. I mean it’s the most amazing place. And the kids said, well what content do we make? I
said, hell, I don’t know. You make whatever you want. Two rules: no shooting violence and no
pornography. Not because I’m opposed to those in particular, but you know, that’s been done with
VR, right? [laughter] And you’d be amazed how many 19-year-old boys are completely out of ideas
when you take those off the table. [laughter and clapping]

Anyway, so I taught the course. The first assignment, I gave it to them, they came back in two
weeks and they just blew me away. I mean the work was so beyond, literally, my imagination,
because I had copied the process from Imagineering’s VR lab, but I had no idea what they could or
couldn’t do with it as undergraduates, and their tools were weaker, and they came back on the first
assignment, and they did something that was so spectacular that I literally didn’t, ten years as a
professor and I had no idea what to do next. So I called up my mentor, and I called up Andy Van
Dam. And I said, Andy, I just gave a two-week assignment, and they came back and did stuff that if I
had given them a whole semester I would have given them all As. Sensei, what do I do? [laughter]
And Andy thought for a minute and he said, you go back into class tomorrow and you look them in
the eye and you say, “Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better." [laughter] And that
was exactly the right advice. Because what he said was, you obviously don’t know where the bar
should be, and you’re only going to do them a disservice by putting it anywhere. And boy was that
good advice because they just kept going. And during that semester it became this underground
thing. I’d walk into a class with 50 students in it and there were 95 people in the room. Because it
was the day we were showing work. And people’s roommates and friends and parents – I’d never
had parents come to class before! It was flattering and somewhat scary. And so it snowballed and
we had this bizarre thing of, well we’ve got to share this. If there’s anything I’ve been raised to do,
it’s to share, and I said, we’ve got to show this at the end of the semester. We’ve got to have a big
show. And we booked this room, McConomy. I have a lot of good memories in this room. And we
booked it not because we thought we could fill it, but because it had the only AV setup that would
work, because this was a zoo. Computers and everything. And then we filled it. And we more than
filled it. We had people standing in the aisle. I will never forget the dean at the time, Jim Morris
was sitting on the stage right about there. We had to kind of scoot him out of the way. And the
energy in the room was like nothing I had ever experienced before. And President Cohen, Jerry
Cohen was there, and he sensed the same thing. He later described it as like an Ohio State football
pep rally. Except for academics. And he came over and he asked exactly the right question. He
said, before you start, he said, where are these people from? He said, the audience, what
departments are they from? And we polled them and it was all the departments. And I felt very
good because I had just come to campus, he had just come to campus, and my new boss had seen in
a very corporal way that this is the university that puts everybody together. And that made me feel
just tremendous.

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