The GameWise goal is to start a tradition of close cooperation between educational institutions and the surrounding world of work with the aim of creating not only new jobs but also new companies by means of entrepreneurship. GameWise will do so by transferring methodologies from Spain and NL to Denmark, Norway and the UK, creating a model for systematic cooperation between educational institutions and private companies. The model will describe how “industry workshops” can form the framework for meetings between students and private companies with ensuing development of products for the companies.
For a good transfer of the methodology, GameWise will develop pilot workshops in the transferring partner institutions to give all partners sufficient insight to create the GameWise model. Afterwards GameWise partners make pilot courses for TVET and tertiary education teachers to secure model mainstreaming. The pilots will be based on action learning, so during the pilot course, the participants will work with, and learn how to establish a company network for the industry workshop, match the companies with the right students, run the workshop, and afterwards assist the students in a process, where they get assignments or jobs in companies, or become entrepreneurs.
To support the course participants, GameWise will establish a common communication platform through which they can get hot line help and coaching. Also, the platform will archive materials developed during the project. For many reasons, the project has chosen the games industry as test bed for the model: the partner institutions have specialized in this field for some years; it is one of the industries with the biggest growth potential in the world today, and with our level of education and infrastructure, Europe should be able to benefit from the growth in this market. Besides, in a recent Green Paper, the EU Commission describes the need to pay more attention to Europe’s potentials for cultural and creative industries (CCIs).
The GameWise project comprises 5 umbrella organizations from the gaming industry. They are silent partners, and their role will be to ensure contact to the end users: private companies in the game industry and to disseminate the project results through their extensive networks. Thereby, the finalised model will be transferred not only to all partner countries, but widely across Europe. The project handbook will be made as a manual for other institutions looking for a similar cooperation with private companies. Even if tested on the games industry, the model is easily transferrable to other sectors. Other dissemination activities will be the online presence of the project (homepage, Facebook, Twitter etc), printed flyers, and contributions to conferences and professional papers. Finally, the project results will be embedded in the partner institutions and form part of a new tradition of cooperation between institutions of education and the surrounding world of work.