EDUCATION
Alison Taylor, founder of FXP Festival and managing director of Conscious Communications, discusses educating and engaging young people in the video games industry right here in Cambridge
“Supporting FXP is enormously important for us at Jagex as part of our community work, but also from a recruitment perspective. Every year I love spending the weekend at FXP, mentoring the students, discovering their fantastic ideas and seeing these ideas come to life when we finally judge the games. Following the festival, we are always more than happy to welcome the winning teams for an afternoon at Jagex. It is fantastic to be able to inspire creative minds as young as 13 or 14 years old, and to give them an insight into careers in the games development industry.” Mark Ogilvie, Design director at Jagex
by challenging them to programme or design a video game, working in teams, over the period of a weekend. In our first year we had around 100 students attend in teams of five, from a number of schools and colleges across East Anglia, and this number has increased year on year. We quickly discovered that FXP was about more than just computer science and games: participating students develop valuable teamwork and communication skills; have the opportunity to demonstrate outstanding creativity; and, importantly, are enabled to develop important connections with exciting local businesses. Over the years we have secured support and funding from a host of local organisations, including Jagex, ARM, YoYo Games, Hacklab, Microsoft, Anglia Ruskin University and Cambridge University Press, many of which have also supported the initiative with the provision of industry mentors throughout the festival weekend. As well as learning about games development, students participating in FXP Festival have the opportunity to quiz industry professionals about their jobs, and are able to discover the variety of career paths available in their surrounding city.
n 2018, Cambridge topped the Centre for Cities league table as Britain’s least equal
city: Cambridge has the sixth highest average weekly earnings of any city in the UK, while within a 45-mile radius of the same city, one in ten households earns less than £16,518 per year. On top of this, Cambridge has the fifth lowest score in the Social Mobility Index of all authorities nationally, based on outcomes for young people in terms of educational attainment, employment and the housing market. Less than a third of pupils who receive free school meals will achieve five or more GCSEs at grades 4-9 (A*-C). Inequality in our city is an extremely complex issue, but one of the ways we can help to drive social mobility in Cambridge is through education – educating young people about the industry and opportunities around them, and teaching them the ways in which they can, one day, be part of it. In 2016, Conscious Communications partnered with North Cambridge Academy, Cambridge Regional College and Jagex to establish FXP Festival – a free educational initiative designed to encourage young people to engage with their Computer Science lessons
ISSUE 02 46
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