Tuesday 6th June marked the beginning of the 7th annual Games Britannia event, a Videogames Education Festival initially started by Brinsworth Comprehensive School back in 2011. The festival brings creativity and technology together, providing schools and colleges with 3 days of workshops and activities led by games industry experts and academics. This innovative package of activities seeks to accomplish Games Britannia’s aim of “Inspiring the next generation of game masters”.
Schools and colleges showed fantastic appetite for the event travelling from Derbyshire, Cheshire, West Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and across the Sheffield City region. We were also fortunate to be paid a visit by our Vice Chancellor, Professor Chris Husbands and Carol Stanfield, the Director of Policy and Projects at SHU, who were both shown around the workshops.
This year Games Britannia opened its doors to over 200 students, across 29 workshops, from Robotics to PSVR Research and Digital Fiction Writing to Motion Capture. The volume of students who visited us, during a busy exam period, exceeded numbers from previous years and is testament to the hard work from all involved and the growing reputation of the festival. It’s great to receive feedback from students saying “One of the best experiences in a university ever. Virtual Reality is amazing”.
After a hugely successful festival for 2017, we quickly look forward to next year to see what we can expect from Games Britannia 2018. As always we hope to expand the event, bringing in more schools and colleges from a wider range of destinations across the UK. We hope to host workshops for larger student numbers with an increased emphasis on sessions from external industry leading experts. We want to provide the most innovate and current workshops which inspire students to go on to further their ambitions and explore potential careers within the industry. So the overall aim for Games Britannia 2018 is clear, to be bigger and better than this year and we hope that you will all be involved in making this a (virtual) reality.
To see a behind the scenes video of Games Britannia please click here
For any enquiries with regards to Games Britannia 2018 please email sclo@shu.ac.uk
You can also follow the festival on twitter @gamesbritannia
