Do you have a good idea for a great talk that would fit in well at the 2017 Game Developers Conference Education Summit?
If you do, we have good news: GDC organizers are now accepting Education Summit talk submissions through Friday, September 23rd. So submit your idea now, because pretty soon it will be too late!
Next year is a great time to be speaking at the event, too, since this will be the 31st edition of GDC. The week-long conference continues to be the world's largest and longest-running event serving professionals dedicated to the art and science of making games.
The GDC Education Summit itself is dedicated to bringing forward the most innovative and exciting ideas in game education today. Attendees will discover new experimental and inventive educational approaches as well as best practices that they can bring back to their faculty and classrooms.
The summit brings together educators from established game development programs with new game course creators that want to understand the challenges they'll face in the next few years. It is a great professional development opportunity that will explore how new areas of game education will advance the field for the next generation of students.
Who Should Submit
You're an inspired educator with some great ideas to share with others about teaching game design/development, to improve everyone's practice. You've done some ground-breaking work on your curriculum or research that we can all use to improve what we are doing with students. You have a unique point of view on teaching game design/development that you haven't seen anywhere else, that you know could add value. You have an idea for a panel, and can assemble some great speakers from various schools to speak to a particular topic. We are looking for new voices, so if you haven't submitted before, please consider doing so. There is probably something amazing and unique about how YOU do things that we would all benefit from hearing about. We are particularly interested in hearing from programs/people who may not be regular attendees.
Audience
The audience consists of educators of game development and studies (spread throughout all levels: K-12, community college, four-year college/university, graduate education). Most attendees are at schools that already have well-established game programs and courses of study (or else they will be in a few short years, once they work the kinks out of a newly-developed program).
We are soliciting the following topics for the 2017 program:
- Inspired approaches to teaching any aspect of game development or game studies.
- Novel ways to fund or publish games research, student game projects, etc.
- Proven best practices for successful programs, courses and research structures.
- Creative funding strategies that have worked for you.
- Strategies for encouraging and teaching diverse student communities.
- Teaching game design/development online.
- Annual lecture themes:
- If you're interested in submitting a talk to one of our annual lecture themes, be sure to note that in the "Summary for Advisors" section of the submission form. These themes include:
- Course case studies - Short presentations (25 min) on the design of a specific course with strong proven results.
- Soapbox - Short presentations (7-10 min) with sharp, pointed commentary on current issues in the state of game education.
Tips for submissions, based on some common mistakes we've seen:
- The education summit is not about serious games, it is about how to teach people about games (how to make games, how to analyze and understand games, issues around graduate research in games, etc.) A talk about teaching serious game development, or a game that helps teach about games, would be appropriate for the Education Summit. Case studies of serious games that have nothing to do with game education are not.
- Don't focus the proposal too much on the speaker and their contributions to the field. If you have an interesting project or case study to share, that's great, but be clear about the audience takeaways. How will attending your talk help hundreds of other educators do their job better?
- Speakers vs panels: Single speaker sessions are the most successful structure. It is difficult to justify two or more speakers for a lecture format, so please consider that. Panels should be considered if your topic would benefit from multiple perspectives, and each speaker on a panel should represent a distinct aspect or point of view of the topic.
- Make sure your topic isn't a beginner-level topic, such as "How to start a game development program", that has been covered many times before. When writing your proposal, it may be useful to look at session names and descriptions for the last three years (and watch talks related to your topic on gdcvault.com). In this way we can build up our collective understanding of the theory and practice of game education.
- Takeaways and topics should be immediately clear from the initial read. Make it obvious why your peers would want to watch your proposed talk. This isn't the time to conceal information. A proposal titled "Five Things You Can Do To Improve Student Retention" should list what those five things are. Give us enough information to evaluate your talk.
GDC 2017 takes place Monday, February 27 to Friday, March 3, 2017 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, and will once again host thousands of game developers from all around the world for a week of learning, networking and inspiration.
For more details on the submission process, please visit the GDC website.
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