Ten pupils from Dublin inner-city secondary schools have been awarded a certificate in Introduction to Games Development following completion of a short course offered by the School of Computing. The course was delivered over the past academic semester by two lecturers from the School of Computing, Ciarán O'Leary and Paul Kelly, assisted by undergraduate students on the DIT’s BSc Computer Science. The course was supported by the Dublin Inner-city Schools Computerisation (DISC) project and the DIT Community Links Office as well as GameStop who provided prizes for participants.
Pupils on the course used the Game Maker toolkit and GIMP image manipulation software for their productions. Throughout the 10 week course, the pupils acquired the many skills required to create computer games based on their own ideas, inspiration, experience and imagination. The pupils were ultimately assessed based on the games which they produced with their classmates. The assessment rewarded students who produced good stories, high quality software and fun games.
Somewhat unusually for technical courses, nine of the ten pupils who completed the course were from girls schools. All pupils were from schools located in the inner-city, close to a campus of the Dublin Institute of Technology.
The secondary schools involved this year were:
- Westland Row Christian Brothers School, Westland Row, Dublin 2
- St. Joseph's Girl's Secondary School, Stanhope Street, Dublin 7
- Mount Carmel Girl's Secondary School, Kings Inn Street, Dublin 1
Posted by: Ciaran O'Leary