GETTING INVOLVED
A few months ago, there was an email passed around about being an ambassador for the technology education sector. I thought it looked interesting, so after discussing it with the futureintech team, I decided that it’d be a good thing to get into.
Basically what it involves is going into schools and giving talks to those that are interested in what I do for a job.
Because I love my job, this is pretty easy. What I try to do is give the kids a good idea of how their study is used in the workplace, and I try to get them to be game developers… It’s pretty much just a sneaky way of recruiting future Straylightians.
The most useful part of what I’ve done so far, (as far as I know) are the question times. The students ask me anything from “What’s your favourite game?”, to the kind of subjects they should be taking if they want to follow a particular career path.
Most recently, I gave a presentation at Otago Girls High School – a surveyor and I talked to one hundred year 13 students about what we do, and how they too could get involved. The response was to be expected – one hundred very quiet year 13 girls and a lone cricket.
I think that the current paradigm of computer games doesn’t initially draw girls to the genre of entertainment, and I don’t think that it has been a common aspiration for girls when they think about what kind of career options are available to them. I talked about all the different ways one can get involved in the computer game development industry, from concept art to graphic design, experience design, producing, graphics programming, 3D modelling, texturing, AI, etc…
Hopefully I inspired some to aspire to a career for a computer game dev company… or at least opened it up for consideration.
