Games Students get Manchester Double Whammy

Develop Conference organisers, Tandem Events, and Games: Edu organisers, Pixel-Lab, have warmed SPOnG's northern cockles by announcing that the Games:Edu 2008 event will get a northern date to go with the Games Grads career fair.

The event will take place in Manchester on 29th April 2008, the same date as its Brighton counterpart which runs alongside Develop.

The aim of the conference, if you've not come across it before, is (according to the Tandem press release) to get together "industry experts and educators together to encourage debate and the sharing of best practice". We're told the Northern event "will feature speakers from some of the UK’s largest studios working on global multi-format titles".

Also confirmed for that date are the Games Grads career fairs, which take place in London and Manchester. The events are aimed at getting game development students some face time with their prospective employers. Last year, some 500 students pulled themselves away from the sofa to attend the event.

Of Games:Edu 2008, Nick Burton, senior software engineer at Rare, said, “Game development has one of, if not the, most diverse skills requirements of all modern media ranging from mathematicians and physicists at one end of the spectrum to actors and architects at the other. For the UK games industry to maintain its position as one of the world leaders we need to continue to develop new areas of education while continuing to work hard with the more traditional routes into our industry such as software engineering and art skills. GAMES EDU gives attendees the chance to discuss these issues and find out how to create students for the UK’s most exiting media industry from some of its most seasoned practitioners.”

For Games Grads, we've got Lynne Jackson from Microsoft Game Studios saying, “Games Grads is an excellent opportunity to meet soon to be graduates and possibly future employees. It gave us an opportunity to advise others and explain more about our company and what we look for in employees. We’ll definitely be there this year.”

SPOnG, for its part, is glad that the North (if you call Manchester 'the North') is getting its own GamesEdu event. Education's important, innit? Plus, if Northern studios are going to grow, we need the educational infrastructure to provide fresh meat. Kids are the future!