Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Week 19 Task

“Some game companies want highly trained graduate artists and programmers. Some claim they really prefer creative individuals with a good Liberal Arts background. They can’t both be right can they?

How can education meet these opposing views and yet provide a valid and fulfilling experience to students?”

I’ve never really thought of creativity as something that can be taught in the first place. You can teach people how to tap into their creativity but at the end of the day if you’re not creative you’re not creative. If that is the case then an educational course would simply need to include a number of exercises that teach the student to keep an open mind and look at things from as many different perspectives as possible. Basically anything that will change a persons interpretations from “it’s a tree” to “it’s a tree, a climbing frame, a lookout, a hiding place, looks like it has a face, shaped like an out stretched hand ,etc.”. If those exercises are added to a course that teaches how to use a decent sized variety of materials and techniques or develop whatever skills are necessary for a good programmer and improve the skill of the student to a point where they are producing industry standard work then the course should succeed in producing graduates that are what the employers are looking for (assuming they admit capable and willing students on to the course).

As far as which is right well trained or good creative minds who are capable of producing good work I’m not entirely sure there is an argument. Of all the advertisements I’ve looked at they all seem to say either “we want skilled applicants” or “we want skilled applicants who can come up with good creative ideas”. I’m yet to see anything saying “we want applicants who have gone to university and got X grade or higher”. All the employers seem to be looking for is skill in a relevant area and not level of training with creativity seeming to only be necessary for the slightly more advanced jobs. As long as you can produce work that is of the calibre the employer desires, work as part of a team, be able to communicate well, keep to work deadlines and at least have some idea of what your doing they don’t seem to care much about how you came to possess those skills. There probably are exceptions or I may have just been looking at the wrong websites but that’s my interpretation of what employers are looking for judging from job advertisements.

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