THE FUTURE SHOP

Recently I was flown up to Wellington by the Ministry of Education, to participate in a Focus group on “Technological Modelling.”

Some researchers have been looking in to how schools teach technological practices to students, and they’re trying to improve the curriculum. We technologists (lol) were there to explain how we use modelling in what we do.

There was a range of people that were invited, from civil engineers to food technologists, a software engineer, a game developer (me), Electrical Engineers, and a Plastics technologist.

We in the game development industry are luckier than we think (well, those that get to do original IP) – other industries have a lot of things set out for them. They start off with many given constraints and starting conditions… whereas our constraints are our imaginations and our abilities.

Perhaps we just have the paralysis of choice… a world of possibilities.

The researcher talked about how in the process of finalizing a product/service/solution the ‘technologist’ has less and less influence on the final result. The questions at the start are somewhat like “Is it worth doing?”, but by the end they’re like “Should the upper widget be slightly more colourful?”.

We (the so-called technologists) talked about how that process plays out in our field, and the different ways we use modelling to prove concepts at all stages of the development.

Hopefully this is of some help to the Education sector in working out how to teach students about technology in a way that is far more relevant to the industry in general than it is now.
...in other words, I hope they get a better foot up in technology than I did!