Delivering a simulated games industry placement to enhance the employability of graduates

1. Delivering a simulated games
industry placement to enhance
the employability of graduates
By Ralph Ferneyhough & Adam Hughes
University of Chester

2. Who we are
Ralph Ferneyhough
Senior Lecturer
Adam Hughes
Informatics Centre Manager

3. Background
 Every University of Chester student must take a work
placement module at the end of level 5
 Option of WBL (real work-based placement) or Experiential
Learning (simulated work-based placement)
 This has been routine for many years with the Computer
Science students, however, this is the first year it has
included Games Development students
 We saw this as an opportunity to embed ‘learners as agents
of change’ into our module.
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4. The problem
Games Dev students’ feedback suggested concerns for the future
 Industry relevance of work
 Relevant practical skills (not just academia)
 Being attractive to employers
Students want to have relevant work to place in their portfolios
 “There is nothing that shows a graduate can hit the ground running more than
having completed and made available games project[s].” (TIGA, 2014)
Inability to find real industry placements
 “…just 21 per cent of people in the UK games industry have undertaken work
experience prior to entering the sector.” (Develop Online, 2015)

5. The plan
Our primary target was to simulate a games
development company:
Create teams mirroring a real studio
 Seeded each team with a first member, who picked a colleague
 Rest of team selected at random
Project briefs to create games which could go to market
as promotional apps
 Shell – to promote a new fuel type
 Jack Daniel’s – to promote new flavours
 easyJet – to promote new frequent flyer programme
….

6. The plan (continued)
A proper relationship between clients and the team
 Formal presentations
 Communications restricted
Working hours and responsibilities to match those found in
a real business
Taught methodologies such as Scrum & Kanban
Industry support
 Talks and presentations from industry
 Industry mentoring and feedback
Most importantly, students were entirely responsible for
their team’s final product

7. Keeping it real
We further attempted to keep them on their toes by:
 Changing the project specification part way through
 Introducing some project creep
 Resilience checks – backups, source control etc.
 Disciplinary actions
 Hours control and timesheets
 Client requests arriving outside of working hours
 Extra work – e.g. marketing and promotional materials
 Making some work redundant
 Added a testing environment (which happened to be Open Day!)
 Wrap party – complete with pizza!

8. Industry mentors
…and some more mentors (just didn’t take photos!)

9. Scrum & Kanban

10. Game proposal meeting

11. Peer group presentation

12. Wrap party

13. Student engagement
• Asking for feedback verbally throughout module about
 Work practices
 Presentations and how they went
 Response to negative events – e.g. extra and redundant work
• Final presentation to clients
• Exit interviews with tutors
• Peer reviews
 Highly critical of each over (especially working hours)
 Showed that working in teams can be hard
• Module evaluation forms
• Student engagement panel - ongoing

14. Student opinions
 “I like how the module taught us to be more self reliant as this is
a much needed skill for indie development”
 “What I enjoyed most about this module is the freedom we had to
organise everything independently as a team and making sure
that we completed the tasks on time”
 “A couple of the team members were quite annoying so it was
unfortunate that we didn't get to choose the group, but then that’s
the same in a real life situation”
 “I think the team leader should have the ability to be able to sack
disruptive people from their team”
 “A small number of students were coming and going as they
pleased, with little respect being shown to those actually working
during the set hours”

15. Looking forward
• HR system to be evolved
 Published in advance – a “contract” of work
 Largely to manage expectations and attitude to work and hours
 Include penalties to marks
 Being able to ‘fire’ staff from teams
• Encourage more professionalism from the students
• Engaging students to complete a full 30 hour week
• Use final year students as the clients next year
• Continue to use students to drive changes

16. Conclusion
 The 1st Circle – Graduates and
students within the IC inform the
curriculum design initially.
 The 2nd Circle – Feedback from current
students has been used to further
shape module content and delivery.
 The 3rd Circle – The Games Dev
students, by joining the module have
delivered further opportunities for
students to act as agents of change.
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17. Any questions / feedback?