Tag Archives: student

Revamping the IGDA Students SIG

igda logo

I’ve been working in the background a reasonable amount on a revamped IGDA Students SIG, which is still a work in progress, and still needs all kind of help to get going (waiting on the new site to get functionally started too doesn’t help matters).

The SIG, even though I am not a student right now, I just hope to get going. There’s been pretty much no student initiatives in the IGDA, the Education SIG is very centred on the educators, not educatees, and so it’s left to revamp the current Student Action SIG. Not much action, so I certainly think Students SIG is enough, for starters.

I’ve yet to contact the old staff from the SIG, but have been trying to contact students of various sorts, mainly through the forums and (nearly dead) mailing list. You will entirely believe how hard it is to find people to contact who haven’t got email addresses available: it’s Very Hard. What came out of this was the proposal – a draft right now, and needing working, I think, mainly on what should happen in the future, as well as organisational details.

Why is this important anyway? Well, even though I’ve barely taken advantage of it, the British Computing Society has an active Students section, and the IEEE has it’s own version. These have different activities, club parts, and so forth. I’m going to be contacting both to get some knowledge of how they operate, and will try at some point to contact our new Executive Director to get their knowledge on the subject.

It might only start as a web-based organisational effort, and not much more, but hopefully if people are willing to help – and unlike the Preservation SIG, I hope not to do all the work myself (since it’s really hard to find non-busy people interested in that niche, I can tell you!), meaning once it’s going it can run under it’s own steam and not peter out like the last attempt, valiant how that appeared at first to be. The new site should, I hope, be the easiest possible way to start it going, we’ll see soon I guess.

Email me now, leave a comment, or catch me at Develop if you will be there, since I’d love to discuss this in person with someone, and I’ll be bringing it up at every opportunity with any students I do meet 🙂

My GDC 2009 Session! Everyone please come! :)

I’m helping the IGDA this year at GDC, where I got offered to help by hosting the Students Social Gathering, and I’m on the GDC site too, wow 🙂 – and I look terrible, yes, oh well! Let’s hope I move on from “Graduate” too, in one way or another. I’m not exactly sure what the event will consist of yet, I might have to plan something, but it is a social gathering, so should be great (I missed last years – it clashed with something else sadly). I hope also that the social is open like 2008, where people who just had an Expo pass could get to the IGDA booth (I think), making it more accessible to students, which for this is perfect.

Also up is the Preservation SIG Roundtable (we’ll see, but I doubt there’ll be any history sessions, although there was one last year I missed), and all the other IGDA things. I’ll be hopefully attending Dave and Alex and Many Other’s organised AI Summit, too. I’ll see if there is anything else interesting, nearer too it I think.