Last Saturday on the 9th of March, we had a chance to teach game creation on 3DHive to students at the UWCSEA TechLIFE 2013 24 hour conference. It was an amazing experience seeing such a well organised event put together by students of the school!

From their site:

TechLIFE 2013 is a student run conference, for students by students of 11 – 18 years old. Students from different schools come together to exchange technology knowledge. All local schools and international schools from Singapore and international schools from further afield are welcome to attend.

Our goal is for all students who attend our conference to walk away with new information about technology and apply it to their everyday lives as well as to be inspired to become a tech leader in the future.

Although there were many workshops run by students for students, companies including Playware were invited to conduct lessons on game creation and share our knowledge and expertise with students who are aspiring to be game developers.

We had an amazing time teaching students how to use 3DHive and create their own games. It was also one of our first public betas for the upcoming release of our Unity 3D version which will be able to run on Windows 7/8, OSX, Android and iOS devices.

President Obama this week said during one of his Google+ fireside chats;

“I think given how pervasive computers and the internet is now, and how fascinated kids are with it, I want to make sure that they know how to actually produce stuff using computers, and not simply consume stuff.”

This is truly exciting news for us at Playware seeing the US President publicly recognising and highlighting the importance of games in the classroom. We believe in game creation as a pedagogy and want to bring the engagement of play into every classroom in the world.

Obama mentioned that video games, technology and computers are becoming more widespread in in the youth today, and has become an important factor in motivating them to learn. The President wants to tap into this wave of excitement  to further the drive for innovation in the United States. A lot of what he mentioned during the State of the Union address was echoed in his sentiments towards putting the US back on  track focusing on a high tech economy with students prepared for jobs in science and technology sectors.

“You look at someone like Mark Zuckerberg [co-founder of Facebook],” said the president, “and he taught himself programming, primarily because he was interested in games.”

Source: Gamasutra

On Thursday 24th of January, teachers from Singapore Ministry of Education Schools and Institutes of Higher Learning joined hosts Playware, Dell and Intel to learn more about how to bring 4 years of action research at the Future Schools@Singapore program to their schools and classrooms. 3DHive and 4Di were on show throughout the event which was held at the Mochtar Riady Audiotorium at the SMU Administration Building.

Highlights included briefings from Ms. Rani Burchmore from Dell, Mr. Siddharth Jain from Playware Studios, Mr. Christopher Tan from Intel, Grace Dong from the Ministry of Education and Mr. Sam Wong from Canberra Primary School.

Check out the images of the event after the jump.

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On Sept 7-9, Playware Studios Asia was all hands on deck exhibiting at TGX to show our 2 latest mobile games. It was a great experience meeting the local gaming community, with both gamers and developers showing strong attendance. It was a huge week for the company and we are very proud to have been a part of the event. Check out pictures of the event and descriptions of the games after the jump.

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This Thursday, the Workforce Development Agency of Singapore officially launched the Creative Industries Virtual World, which is a serious game and tool to provide training and career opportunities for professionals in the arts and creative industries. It is essentially a virtual community for the industry to foster relationships and network for career development.

As a company that strongly believes games for learning provides the ability to select actions, experience consequences, and conduct experiments in a risk free environment; we are delighted to have worked on this project with WDA Singapore to help further the country’s professionals in their future growth.

You can view the official webpage of the virtual world here

Check out official coverage from the local news outlets over at:

The Straits Times

Asia One

Channel News Asia