Skills shortage hits games firms

From the BBC article of the same name, and further discussion on the Develop magazine website.

The UK games industry is claiming a skills shortage is impairing growth. While there has been a huge growth of games development degrees, David Braben claims that

95% of video gaming degrees are simply not fit for purpose. Without some sort of common standard, like Skillset accreditation, these degrees are a waste of time for all concerned.

(An opportune moment for me to mention that the course here at UWS is one of only four courses to have that Skillset accrediation… and that at least 3 of the small cohort of 9 students due to graduate next month have already accepted job offers)

Meanwhile I have to agree with Dan Hodgson of Northumbria when he notes that:

We do have people who don’t have the right mindset. We consistently tell them that this is one of the hardest courses we offer at this university. It’s certainly not for the sort of people who want to laze around and play games for three years.

Which is perhaps why we have a small graduating class - many of our students transfer to other courses which demand less technical and mathematical skills part way through the degree. The problem is not likely to be easy to fix, with the (noted elsewhere) decline in maths and physics in schools. Hopefully this is a trend that can be reversed.

Games on the curriculum

I spotted this intriguing piece earlier in the week -” ‘Games’ to be taught in Scottish Schools”

The article doesn’t reveal much in the way of details but claims:

Scottish schoolchildren are to be taught the basics of video game design as part of the country’s new national curriculum - dubbed the ‘Curriculum of Excellence’.

According to the Press Association, the move is to designed to ‘create the next generation of young programmers’.

Schools minister Maureen Watt unveiled the scheme … and added that the new lessons will teach children how to use computer software to create animations and feature films.

The typo there is that it is the Curriculum for Excellence, not of Excellence. But more frustrating were my attempts to learn more about this. Eventually via an enquiry to LTS I found the relevant details here. I’ve had a chance to briefly review these, searched out the references to games, and given this a little thought…

Channel 4 sponsors Dare to Be Digital… Introduces education as a theme

Channel 4 has announced sponsorshop of the Dare to Be Digital summer game development competition. Announced here.

As part of their sponsorship (which apparently is for a significant sum of money to support the competition), a brief to develop games with an educational or serious ‘twist’ has also been provided:

Alan Kay at TED

If I hadn’t fallen behind again on my RSS feeds, I might have had this last week… but I just realised that TED happened again this year - a few weeks ago, and now the videos are all online. It’s easily possible to spend a day just watching the TED videos - and I can guarantee that it wont be a day wasted, with so many fantastic thinkers and do-ers gathered together and sharing their ideas. Homepage for this year’s event is here.

Meanwhile, I’ve finally caught up with Alan Kay’s presentation from last year!.

The presentation includes some brilliant demonstrations - and quite possibly should be required viewing for everyone involved in education… with simple demonstrations which show that its quite achievable to get 6 year old children to manage to work with differential equations! (Though perhaps without the jargon)

His talk features children’s use of simulation for experiments (with e-toys) and also touches on the OLPC laptop.

ThinknDrinkn

ThinknDrinkn is a game created by S1 pupils at two local Paisley schools to raise awareness of many of the issues around alcohol consumption. The game was created in collaboration with UWS (my institution) and a local games company, KodeTank. It was launched just the other day, and got some coverage on the BBC.

There is also a more detailed gameplay video on TeacherTube.

I took part in the first session in a game design brainstorming exercise - when the pupils met with health and police experts, with KodeTank and with ourselves. It was great to see all the ideas that came out of that first session - though the weight of my other commitments sadly kept me from staying involved in the project throughout.

Newtoon update

Newtoon update… (last mentioned here)

A video has been added to the page at Futurelab, so you can see Newtoon being used/played by students - and being discussed by the developers. I have to say that I’d still be more tempted to use Phun based on what can be seen here. Phun looks far more powerful, and based on open-ended play. Newtoon somewhat simpler, but can run on (some) phones and based around using the physics to create ‘micro-games’.

But you can download both if you want to compare - Newtoon from here.

(I wonder why Futurelab don’t also post their videos on YouTube… would allow me to embed it here at least!)

Catching up on reading

I’m almost embarrassed about how far behind I’ve fallen in my attempts to catch up with games-based learning literature. Luckily for me, Tony Forster has recently been working overtime on his - and doing a good job of highlighting papers of interest and providing his own critique as well as reviews of GBL games.

Handily, for searching purposes, many of these posts have been part of his studies for a class in Instructional Simulations & Games - and have been labeled accordingly. So you can find them here. Outside of this current thread, he also recently posted a short discussion on mental models and problem solving, which I found interesting and which is part of a larger argument in development.

Visual Studio Pro for Free

Microsoft have announced Dreamspark (yeah, not a great name, but hey) - a program allowing students to download a wide range of their professional developer tools. XNA Game Studio 2.0 is also included. Students will need a Windows Live ID account, and their school needs to be signed up to the program - and needs to act as an ‘identity provider’. Though this (happily) can be done without sharing data about the student - other than confirming that a user is a student:

Administrators are able to share information over an encrypted channel using Shibboleth or Microsoft CardSpace technologies. Using Shibboleth, students will be able to assert their identities by logging in to their Universities with their existing log in credentials. If the log in is successful a binary True/False value will be returned back to the Microsoft site via HTTPS/SSL encryption. No sensitive student information (including passwords) is shared with the DreamSpark site using Shibboleth. CardSpace is similar, in that a card is sent to the student and is used as the means of verification, without sharing any personal student information. Both of these devices, Shibboleth and CardSpace, help enable verification without sharing sensitive student data.

Not yet sure if my own school will have signed up…

Workshop on Teaching Programming

31st of March will see the 8th Programming Workshop of the HEA-ICS. This time it’s being held at Glasgow University - very handy for myself, so hopefully I’ll be able to attend.

My colleague John Sutherland will be presenting on his experience of using Scratch with beginner programmers. No details yet, but there also appears to be something on the Nintendo Wii.

Newtoon: Learn Physics Making Games

Yet another exciting looking project from Futurelab - Newtoon:

Newtoon is a mobile phone and web activity which aims to embed physics learning in mobile game creation and play. It enables young people to create microgames via a web interface on a PC in a 2D world consisting of balls and springs. The games can be trialled and edited on the PC, and various physics principles regulating the movement of objects can be manipulated via the interface.

More here. The full report looks like a worthwhile read - with some very strong apparent outcomes. A very limited discussion below.