College launches iPhone videogame course
Eyes front, sit up straight
Don’t like the games on your iPhone or iPod Touch? Well, you’ll soon be able to make your own, if you pass the world’s first iPhone videogame course.
The iPhone Game Development curriculum has been created by London-based Qantm College as a way of teaching anyone with some experience of videogame design how to expand their skills into iPhone videogame creation.
Nic Oliver, Marketing Manager for Qantm College, told Register Hardware that everyone who signs onto the course will receive a free iPod Touch.
“The iPhone hardware is the base of the course’s teaching and it touches on numerous disciplines, including memory management, Flash, etc. But students will also be able to adapt their skills to develop videogames for other handsets,” he said.
Oliver added that the college is currently working to gain Apple recognition for the course, which – if granted – he claimed would make Qantm College the first college able to offer an Apple-accredited iPhone videogame development course.
The London-based three-month course takes place in the evenings and weekends, with a price tag of £3950 ($7290/€4990). Qantm College plans to roll the course out to other countries, including Australia and the Netherlands.
More details to appear at the Qantm website.
COMMENTS
Insane
£4k is an insane amount of money. If you're going to learn to do something, do it properly and put yourself through a computer science degree.
iPhone development is as difficult as buying a mac and learning to program - and that shouldn't cost anyone 4k... more like £60 for a few second hand books from Amazon and a few weeks of heads-down focus for a novice.
I don't think the NDA will be a big hurdle - Apple have just announced the University programme, no doubt they'll extend it to Academies. But I do think - like 90% of "gaming academies" that this stinks of racketeering.
It probably happened because....
.... some lecturer who salivates over his iphone thought it was a good idea, convinced his numpty of a manger (who was probably a lecturer 3months ago and has no managerial experience but was promoted anyway). Before anyone with any kind of sense knew about the course it was being advertised by said lecturer in the usual appalling word art poster way (cause he probably believes cause he owns an Apple something he has design skills) and it was all too late then.
The above can be applied to most new courses that don't really make sense to us normal folk as to why they are being run.
4k for a 3 month course
Is it me or does that sound a little steep, ok there are no hours quoted but still it sounds like an awful lot when a) it says you need gaming experience and b) the iphone is only a different platform with some new possibilities but its still only a new platform.
iPhone games course?
Why not just do computer games tech or something similar at Abertay or one of those places? *checks* Okay, so it's 1/16th or so as long and not in Dundee. BUT it's vastly more useful- what's the iPhone games qual going to be worth 4 versions of the software down the line? And do the students get all the normal privileges an Apple developer would get (access to SDK, derision from peers, phreaky's rants as an email, that sort of thing?)
If it was Apple themselves who'd created a qualification and this college was providing the course (as I believe Cisco and Microsoft do) then fair enough. But this just sounds like another "David Beckham Studies" style cynical grab at money at best.
Fab...
But it won't get Apple-accreditation unless Steve gets 50% of the course proceeds and 50% of the sales of any game developed by course-takers.
Silly bandwagon-hoppers...
