Published curriculum · September 2026
Gaps already visible, and gaps the rules still allow.
A known gap appears on an ordinary path through the major. A possible gap appears when a less common route is still permitted. Neither list is yet a count of how often students meet it.
On the ordinary path
Select a point on the sequence. The marks are features of the published curriculum for a student who follows the four-year plan and stays on one degree track.
Already known
- Order. IMDM490 can begin without IMDM390. Studio II remains required for the degree and can be taken in the last semester, concurrent with IMDM491 and the public showcase. Skills learned in that studio then have no later course in which to enter the senior project or to be shown as advanced understanding.
- Handoff. The advised order still does not require an individual outcome to move from IMDM290 to IMDM390, or from IMDM390 to IMDM490.
- Clusters rather than paths. Games, extended reality, artificial intelligence, interaction, physical computing, three-dimensional work, sound, and creative research are present as pieces. Game design and artificial intelligence lack a shared introduction that both tracks can enter, and their clearest advanced courses sit behind Computing prerequisites.
- A thin middle. Portfolio work is explicit at the third-semester review and again at exhibition. Professional practice is concentrated in Capstone. Published materials do not say which facilities every student who finishes a given course has used.
- Two doors into shared courses. IMDM227 can be reached by IMDM101 with CMSC131, or by IMDM127 with CMSC122. A shared studio that assumes only one of those preparations is ahead of the other track.
Less common routes
The same rules become sharper when a student reaches 86 credits before the advised semester of IMDM390, misses a spring-only studio, and therefore takes Collaborative Studio II in the showcase semester, finds an area only in Capstone, leaves a team project with no individual record, or can reach advanced work only through a special topic, a permission seat, or whichever facility that section’s project happened to use.
Prior credit can satisfy a prerequisite line without supplying the introductory studio experience the next IMDM course expects. An advising conversation can make a path real for one student and leave it invisible to another. Under the definition, a path that depends on private knowledge is still a cluster.
Faculty sheets can confirm whether a published gap is what every student in an offering actually meets. The student worksheet can show where students wanted to go further and the order in which they took IMDM290, IMDM390, and Capstone. Offering records can show how often Capstone starts without Studio II.