IT students take inspiration from Museum of Liverpool trip

18 November 2019

IT teacher Paul Moore explains the somewhat unusual idea behind getting IT students away from their computers to soak up some local culture ahead of their computer game development projects:

The Museum of Liverpool may seem an unlikely place for an IT trip, but this was a different IT trip…

Rather than looking at IT stuff, the aim of the trip was for each student to come up with at least two ideas for a game to meet their client brief. Their brief is that the Museum of Liverpool wants to have a new game developed for one of their galleries that would appeal to younger visitors of 12 and under. They have had plenty of opportunity to explore the galleries and exhibits, hear from local history experts and experience some of the sights, sounds and smells of Liverpool in different time periods throughout history (from pre-history to modern day). Armed with pens, pencils, paper and phones to take photos, the budding game developers got their creativity flowing using exhibits in the galleries as inspiration for the games they will now design and develop.

Before we finished, all of the students gave a brief flavour of their game ideas to me. There were lots of great ideas which could realistically be made in the timescales they have.

It will be exciting over the coming months seeing their ideas develop into full game designs and then be made into real games.

Game development forms part of second year of the BTEC Level 3 Diploma IT course. In this part of the course, students learn about Programming, Game Development and Project Management then put their knowledge into practice with a game development project.