Student Feature: 'Soapbox: Immediate Professionals - Dev Kits and University Game Degrees'

In today's Gamasutra student feature, part of our expanded education coverage, SMU Guildhall game student James Stewart gets on the Student Soapbox to make his case for giving console development kits to game universities, to further game education and leave graduating students better prepared to face the real world. In the introduction to his Soapbox, Stewart explains: "Development kits for modern consoles require more security than the average nuclear reactor. Students enrolled in game development programs could sooner get their hands on a suitcase full of undepleted Uranium than an Xbox 360 dev kit. That's the way it seems, at least. The truth is much more mundane: Academic game degrees are a new thing. The industry isn't used to hiring new employees from such programs, and the tradition of philanthropy that sustains almost all universities hasn't had time to take root—there's no “older generation” to give back to the younger. Though a few developers and hardware manufacturers are beginning to form relationships with institutions of higher learning, less than a dozen schools worldwide have access to the technology that their graduates will use daily in the “real world.” The issue comes down to trust. In the new few paragraphs, I hope to persuade industry decision-makers that it is worth their while to make dev kits more accessible to university students." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including more on the problems for students without access to console development kits (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external web sites).