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Computer and Software Engineering

University of Ontario Institute of Technology

To be successful in the fast-growing gaming sector, companies need artistic, technical and management expertise. The University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) offers degree programs in all three areas, making it unique in North America. It trains students in management and business skills specific to the gaming sector, and ensures they get a thorough grounding in technical and artistic gaming skills as well.

Transcription:

University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Mark Green, Ph.D.
Professor, Faculty of Science

At the University of Ontario Institute of Technology we have two programs that address the needs of the game and multimedia industries within the faculty of science. We have a stream within our computer science program which deals with digital media. This is a very technical, programming oriented stream which produces programmers and technical people that will go out into the game and digital media industry. This program starts in September of 2007; we’re going to have our first class just coming up. Within the factually of business and information technology we have the game design and entrepreneurship program which is a broader program which looks at the arts and the technical side as well as the business side of game development. So we’re producing someone who can go into a game company, start working at a technical, artistic level, but then go up the management chain and understand how you manage these types of enterprises, or possibly go out and start their own company.

One of the main challenges in game design and in software design in general is a lack of management skill. There’s a real lack of people that can do technical management, that’s just not been developed in any of the programs to date, this technical management skill.  But it’s really needed. We really need to have managers who understand the technology, who understand how things are put together, have the respect for the programmers that are working for them. So they need to have those business and management skills, so one of the advantages of the programs that we’re putting together is that students have those skills. They’re getting the management in the business courses, along with the technical courses so they understand the management issues, they can move up.

The whole information technology industry is about to go through another rapid growth period. We’re about to face the first retirements or major retirements from this industry there are people of my generation or a little bit older who got into the industry in the 60s and 70s and are now of retirement age. So we now have to replace those people. We’ve not had this happen in the information technology industry before. We’ve never had to worry about retirements. Now we’ve got this issue of producing people to fill the void that’s going to come from these retirements. And these programs will fill that void.

Ontario has a number of the key ingredients required to make this a hot bed of information technology and game and software development. We have the universities here that are producing the talent. We have a lot of very good university programs not only at UOIT but across the Province. Ontario is a very livable area. It’s still reasonably priced compared to some parts of the world. It’s a very diverse environment. You have the urban environments in Toronto, but you can just go a few hours outside of Toronto and get a much more rural, more relaxed environment which is appealing to certain programmers. If you want to attract the very best people you have to 
have an environment where they want to live and they feel that they’re getting the quality of life that they want. And one of the benefits that we have in Ontario is this wide range of places where you can set up, you can have the urban city environment that you would find in Toronto and Waterloo and places of that nature. But then you can move out to places like Oshawa or further North and find a much more relaxed environment. We still have the connectivity, the networking, the people, but we can now sort of adjust where people work to make it a much more pleasant environment for them to work. So we can not only have the technology and infrastructure, we have the environment that can attract the very best people.

Mark Green, Ph.D.
Professor, Faculty of Science
University of Ontario Institute of Technology

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