Faculty & Staff
Stay tuned for staff profiles from the upcoming season!
Our staff consists of top-tier instructors with backgrounds in programming. The staff has also demonstrated technical and instructional excellence. Check back regularly as we add content to these pages for the upcoming season.
Randy Polliard
Academy Program Manager
Randy graduated in 1988 from the University of Colorado with a BS in Business Administration and an emphasis in Marketing. While he is now employed full time with iD Gaming Academy and iD Programming Academy, he has been an Art Director and contributing animator for more than ten game titles for publishers as diverse as THQ® and Microsoft®. In addition to being trained in traditional animation, Randy has had Flash® animation cartoons published by ESPN.com and is a freelance sports cartoonist for the Seattle Times. Randy has been working with iD for 6 years and has been at the helm of the Academy since its inception.
iD Programming Academy, Stanford University
Howard Shen
Director
Since graduating from Stanford with a B.S. in Chemistry, a minor in Computer Science and an M.A. in Education, Howard has indulged his inner nerd by helping teenagers explore the mysteries and joys of science as a teacher in Redwood City, CA. He has spent the last three years focusing on the structure and behavior of atoms in chemistry, but will be turning his focus to the evolution controversy in biology next year. Howard also actively mentors a group of 15 students through life as a teenager and the college application process. When he’s not teaching, Howard avidly reads science, science fiction, fantasy, and semi-classy romance novels. He also enjoys playing old-school RPGs on the GameCube and DS.
Matthew Dilts – Stanford iDPA Lead Instructor
Matthew Dilts is a graduate of Lehigh University P.C. Rossin College of Engineering & Applied Science where he studied Computer Science with a focus on Artificial Intelligence. After working on database driven supply chain management software with Apprise Software in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Matthew continued his education at Lehigh University, obtaining a Master’s Degree in Computer Science. During this time, he created a PC version of the popular board game Descent: Journeys in the Dark, which allowed software developers to create AI for the game. His extensive research with AI on the platform culminated in a Master’s Thesis as well as a research paper which is being published for the International Conference on Case Based Reasoning 2010.
David Schwartz – Stanford iDPA Instructor
David Schwartz is finishing up at UC Santa Cruz with a major in Computer Science: Game Design. His education has focused on the fundamentals of computer science, computer engineering, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, along with coding in C, C++, and Java. David has worked on several extensive projects with his colleagues. He has created a space shooter in Microsoft XNA game studio, a game recommendation chat bot coded in Python, and then later independently developed his own tornado simulation in openGL. He looks forward to devoting his final year at UC Santa Cruz to the senior game design project. In addition, David is a musician with 12 years of classical piano experience. He uses Reason 4.0 to compose electronic music, some of which was used in games made by other university colleagues.
Andrew Hyde Jr. – Stanford iDPA Instructor
Andrew has earned separate B.S. degrees in Network Engineering and Software Engineering at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI. He began his career in gaming, working as a private consultant for Blizzard Studios, followed by a short stint at a small gaming company in Providence working on their first console game. He is an expert at the entire C based family, as well as Java, Perl, and Google GO. Most recently Andrew has been working as a Cyber-Security Consultant for small to midsized companies on the East Coast. Throughout the past two years, he has been working on iPhone Application Development for startup companies. Andrew was a part of the iPhone Curriculum development team for iD, and is extremely excited about working at the iD Programming Academy.
Alec Boutin – Stanford iDPA Instructor
Alec Boutin is looking forward to his final year at UC Santa Barbara studying Computer Science. He actively develops iPhone apps and has an app on the iTunes store named Gamematica. Alec is also the project coordinator for the UC Santa Barbara chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery. He works with club members to develop exciting and useful applications in a team environment.
iD Programming Academy, MIT
Brian Call – MIT iDPA Instructor
Brian holds a degree in Software Engineering with a minor in Finance from Rochester Institute of Technology. He has worked at various financial services companies including Bank of New York and JPMorgan Chase, where he will work full-time after the Academy. He has a passion for mobile application development and currently has 2 apps on the Android Market, one of which has been downloaded over ten-thousand times. He has programming experience in Java, C++, C#, Objective-C and various scripting languages. Over the past few years, he has designed and developed several websites which are still going strong today.
Terry Finn – MIT iDPA Instructor
Following his passion, Terry has been developing applications and video games for the past few years. His college course work has emphasized advanced programming. iPhone development, and console and PC game development. Terry is proficient in C#, Java, C, Objective-C, and Ruby. In addition, he has mentored students of the Upper Perkiomen Technology Student Association in web development, as well as served as team leader on many development projects at Montgomery County College.
Join Our Team!
Interested in working for a premier summer program for teens? For details on how to apply for the iD Programming Academy, please refer to our employment page.
