Cruising the High Seas of Game Education

I'm not sure how the education folks at Microsoft were able to convince management, but they succeeded at getting themselves and 200+ academics and industry folks onto a cruise ship to Cozumel! Boondoggle quips aside, they had us working hard with daily sessions starting at 8am and tech labs running up until dinner. Sure, I'll admit that I skipped a few sessions in order to get some R&R...

Anyway, the whole premise was to get academics talking about how to leverage games in spicing up existing curriculum (eg, using games as an application area for a course on artificial intelligence) along with discussions on how universities can best meet the growing workforce needs of the game industry. Kudos to Microsoft of driving this agenda - beyond their obvious motive of propagating Windows everywhere, they are simply keen in finding ways to improve enrollment in computer science programs and helping the industry move forward.

I was on hand to run the "industry panel", which turned out to be a lively discussion of how we can all best work together. Of note, EA's head of university relations, Colleen McCreary, lamented on how they had such massive difficulty with integrating 300 straight-out-of-college hires (within their 6000+ workforce). They'd certainly want (and need) to hire more, but the industry itself is so ever-evolving that it becomes hard to absorb rookies. This leads to the classic need of gaining work-like experience before getting to work, highlighting the importance of team projects during school.

I'm hoping that someone will write up a more thorough report, as my above ruminations really do not do justice to the breath/depth of what took place...

[Update 1: An academic who attended offers up his (anonymous) feedback and thoughts (97kb pdf) on the conference.]

[Update 2: Forbes writer Leah Hoffmann writes up an amusing summary of the event (her father was one of the faculty attending the conference).]

Posted on January 27, 2006 12:20 PM

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