Students at Hope’s Two Rivers Education Centre (TREC) will soon be able to get high school course credit for designing a video game. The school has gained formal approval from SD78 to implement a new online course championed by teacher Jacob Cowan.
“It teaches students how to use Unity (Real Time Development Platform), which is one of the most common video game design platforms,” Cowan said. “It can do 2D and 3D games and it’s also used to make films. A lot of games like Among Us, Call of Duty Mobile and League of Legends: Wild Rift are examples of hundreds and hundreds of games that have been designed on it.”
Where film use is concerned, Cowan said the background animation from the 2019 Disney film Lion King was done with the platform.
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“Students will start out learning the basics and they’ll build up to the point where they’re building their own video game,” Cowan said. “I think it’s a cool opportunity for them to do something with real-world applications.”
TREC is accessing Video Game Dev 11 through the Western Canadian Learning Network and it will be offered to Grade 11 students.
Cowan believes that as kids near graduation, it’s important to teach skills that are more transferable to a workplace.
“When they’re younger, learning some basic coding skills is great,” he said. “But as they get older, working on a platform that they will actually be using in the real world is important. At the end of the process they’ll have a game they can share with their friends or possibly use on a job or university application.
“It’s an exciting project because the more choice they have, the more they can pick something that really interests them and the more engaged they’ll be.”
Cowan did research when seeking approval for the course, and found that a lot of top-end video game design jobs pay $200,000-$300,000.
“It can be quite a rewarding career path,” he said.