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From http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0205/science.html
Concern over lack of computer graduates
Thursday, 5 February 2009 10:43The head of an Irish software firm has warned that Ireland is not producing enough top level maths or computer science graduates.
The warning comes despite the fact that Ireland’s science base has doubled in the past nine years.
Managing Director of Havok David O’Meara warned that Ireland is not producing enough Maths or Computer Sciences graduates at the top level.
AdvertisementIrish technology company Havok provides interactive software and services to the gaming and movie industries.
Mr O’Meara expressed disappointment at the Irish response to a competition run by his company to promote the use of maths and physics in video game design among second-level and third-level students.
A quarter of the $40,000 prize money was ring-fenced for an Irish winner, but many of the leading third level institutions failed to enter the competition and even fewer secondary schools took part.
Yesterday, the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor Patrick Cunningham, said that although Ireland has doubled its science base in the past nine years, it is still average compared to leading European countries like Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.
And last December Google confirmed it had abandoned plans for 100 software engineering jobs in Dublin, because it could not find enough qualified candidates here
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It’s a bad sign when even Irish companies are saying our colleges aren’t producing good enough graduates, but then are they referring to graduates who’d be suited to the games side of things or in general? I’m assuming they’re refering to the gaming side of it but I could be wrong.
From my own experience in DCU, if you wanted to do anything game related you had to do all the work yourself whereas stuff that had a business leaning (databases is an obvious example) there were a lot more resources (lecture notes and lecturers) available to you.
But whenever anything was mentioned about gaming as a career the predominant emphasis was on how hard the field is not only to get into but also to stay there. When I was over in Brighton a guy from NCSoft gave a very informative talk about the industry but constantly drilled home how difficult the industry is to crack. I can totally understand the importance of being realistic – sure how many people, honestly, here were hoping to write the next Quake when they wrote their first game? :wink:
So from the perspective of a college undergrad why burst yourself chasing something that even the people who work there say is incredibly difficult when you can go into the, albeit pretty boring (IMHO), world of .net, web services and databases where jobs are (well, were before the economy went down the pipes) easier to come by, better paid and more secure?
And last December Google confirmed it had abandoned plans for 100 software engineering jobs in Dublin, because it could not find enough qualified candidates here[/quote:d5f2770b81]
Google can be very specific about the candidates they want, and the article doesn’t mention what area the jobs are in. But Google don’t just hire software engineers for any old thing. Apart from maybe a graduate position you need to generally have a lot of experience with a language or two, a bunch technologies (distributed systems, open source databases, web servers etc) and OS’s that are Windows.
Woah, I should probably cut back on my caffeine intake I didn’t realise this post had gotten so long… :lol:
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Coincidentally I saw this piece on RTE 2 last night while having a conversation with a friend of mine over the re-introduction of college fees (and how/if it would effect the quality of education). It summed up pretty much how I feel about Irish education in general. We had a good few years to fix the problems and upgrade the system. Maybe introduce a decent IT subject at 2nd level. Alas, there’s no money to do that now so I think people are really going to be left behind.
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"Mr O’Meara expressed disappointment at the Irish response to a competition run by his company to promote the use of maths and physics in video game design among second-level and third-level students."
Entries: http://softwarecontests.intel.com/havok/viewentries.php
Most aren’t fantastic Irish or otherwise. I have had loads of ideas when I head about competition but had just completed a college course when it was announced. Surprised it wasn’t pushed more by colleges but I know how busy is can be at start of new term…perhaps a longer run in time for promotion would help. Hope havok/intel run it again as did seem like a great opportunity.(One idea was an FPS with physics stream guns (would look like protonpacks :) )that you could could paint flow fields in 3D with (which would decay over time) and capture players in vortexes and slam against walls or jump into your own stream to move to higher platforms. I think that would be neat.
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"Surprised it wasn’t pushed more by colleges but I know how busy is can be at start of new term…perhaps a longer run in time for promotion would help. Hope havok/intel run it again as did seem like a great opportunity. "
Workload is nothing to do with it being under-subscribed. Difficulty i would say was a big part, reckon only about 5% of CS/Eng student maybe less would be capable of doing something neato with havok. Dont get me wrong havok is a great tool kit, but few students would be tech savvy enough to actually used it.. Majority of CS student take html based modules to coast through. lol
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"Surprised it wasn’t pushed more by colleges but I know how busy is can be at start of new term…perhaps a longer run in time for promotion would help. Hope havok/intel run it again as did seem like a great opportunity. "
Workload is nothing to do with it being under-subscribed. Difficulty i would say was a big part, reckon only about 5% of CS/Eng student maybe less would be capable of doing something neato with havok. Dont get me wrong havok is a great tool kit, but few students would be tech savvy enough to actually used it.. Majority of CS student take html based modules to coast through. lol[/quote:2cab5d0a95]
A big problem for our entry was actually competing projects. I recall at one stage having 4 different programming assignments (not small ones either) and several exams to study for as well- all at the same time. We have to sleep at some stage unfortunately. It’s a shame because I really would have liked to have given this competition more time.
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1. Its a great idea and the prize money is very attractive. It is however "competing" with several other student centric games programming
competitions that are quite well established such as Dare to Be Digital, Imagine Cup, XNA Ireland Challenge and are more accessible technically.2.When I teach physics middleware in 4th year, students usually spend the first 4 weeks of the course learning the required mathematics first:
Linear algebra
Matrices & matrix transformations
Newtonian physics
Rotations (yaw, pitch roll etc)
Quaternions
Torque, inertial tensors, angular velocity, angular acceleration etc.We then spend 3 weeks studying how to program a physics engine looking at rigid bodies, integration, keeping the rendering in sync, joints, collision detection and we do a few complex examples, like how to make a
4 wheeled steerable vehicle and how to program a gravity gun. We use ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) and DirectX (all C++). ODE is very well documented and easy to program with very little "bolierplate" code required to make a simulation work. So it takes 7 weeks of classes and labs (4 hours per week) to get students to the level of being able to program a physics engine. I think hoping undergrad students would be able to figure out the Havok SDK, which has 900 pages of API
documentation, minimal tutorials, no books, no wiki is not realistic.Even the most basic Havok examples seem to require tens of lines of set
up code and I dont like putting code into programs when I dont
understand what it does! On top of that, just to make the programs
compile I had to spend several hours trawling the internet to remove
compile time errors. Havok is obviously a more complex and powerful
platform than ODE with a steeper learning curve.3. When Microsoft wanted to encourage the use of XNA in third level,
they ran the XNA world tour, provided academics with books, lots of
examples, the faculty connection website and XNA creators club accounts
for free. As a consequence XNA is becoming quite popular (we teach it in
3rd year). I think it would be great for Havok to engage with the
universities a bit more. We would love to work with Havok on courses,
syllabi etc. Some training events, support
for busy lecturers and students would be great. We would be happy to
integrate the Havok SDK into courses and the Physics Cup in assignments
if we could get some help to do this.4. I think the dates were going to be a problem. Much better to align
them with the academic calendar so that people can use the Physics cup
in assignments. Students generally have about 5 assignments per
semester, so better if the Physics cup could be one of them rather then
an add on. -
wrote lots of stuff [/quote:dd85ea2b4d]
Great post, sounds like a lot of good ideas there :)
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I’m involved with the STEM programme in NI. I’m also involved in the NI YS, one of the things I’ve noticed is that some schools really focus on maths and physics. Their students excel. There are schools in the south that are similarly focussed.
Their success is mainly due to two things the maths and physics teachers and students that give a toss about the subjects. I don’t have the exact numbers but do know that when I was in school (a few years ago now…;-) ) there were only two of us taking physics and nuts enough to do honours – that was due to a passionate physics teacher.
I was speaking to a science teacher last week, who has been unable to get any students to take physics for the leaving in the past two years. Its a similar situation across the country. So I guess things are not getting any better. With over 5000 students failing leaving cert maths, in 2008 there something fundamentally wrong.
As for the low takeup for the Havok competition – its a symtom of the underlying problem. Yes people are busy – but they need to get busy building their portfolio as its becoming even more difficult to land that dream job.
I think what scooter500 listed as a syllabus is a very effective approach. It will still take people – willing – to get their heads around the required maths and physics.
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When people say there aren’t enough graduates available in a given sector, usually what they are really saying is that there aren’t so many graduates available that wages are cheap.
On a separate issue, on the havok competition, I think the article is wrong?
It says:A quarter of the $40,000 prize money was ring-fenced for an Irish winner[/quote:1a0010573b]
(Previously articles talk about 40k euro)
This is apparently in contrast to:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/havokt-physics-innovation-contest-official-rules/
which talks about prize money of 5000$ for a single Irish entrant.In other words, the official rules seem to talk about a prize of 3500-4000euro for an Irish winner. (There’s also a GDC pass, but then you have to pay travel yourself.)
If it takes a student 100-200 hours to put together a decent entry to have a chance of winning, you’re looking at a fairly modest hourly rate, when you factor in the chances of winning vs getting nothing, against an unknown number of other entrants.
Maybe students thought it wasn’t a good idea to spend time on the competition vs. spending time on coursework, or other projects. Students can be pretty busy, and it can take a big competition to convince them to take time from coursework.
Fair play to anyone that found the time to go and do it, and was maybe doing a similar project anyway, or just was interested in the area.
But, considering the structure of the competition, and the relatively modest prizes, I’d say it’s not that surprising there weren’t huge volumes of Irish entrants.
I’d look at the comments made, in that light.Also:
even fewer secondary schools took part.[/quote:1a0010573b]
Unless I’m missing some other part of the competition – it’s not at all surprising that few secondary school students entered the competition against potentially 4th year CS students?Your entry must be a playable PC game demo that includes new or unique uses of Havok technology.[/quote:1a0010573b]
Considering what you have to make for an entry, I’d be very impressed that secondary school students entered at all (the article implies some did). Considering they knew they were up against third level students and considering what they had to make to enter, the fact that second level students entered at is something I wouldn’t state as a negative.It also looks as if the rules, strictly as they appear, disqualify second level students anyway – at least from the Irish prize – on the basis that:
Entrants must be currently attending a third level institution within the island of Ireland…[/quote:1a0010573b]
Maybe some entered anyway, but if the rules were saying you have to be third level, it’s another reason to expect the numbers to be down. -
Great post Feral, lots go good digging there.
Slightly off topic, but does it worry any one else when a news site reports on a game related matter and gets lots of facts wrong? It makes me wonder if they do the same with other subjects too. Perhaps when covering the Middle East \ Science \ Medicine they make similar errors, but we are not knowledgable enough to notice those.
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Slightly off topic, but does it worry any one else when a news site reports on a game related matter and gets lots of facts wrong? It makes me wonder if they do the same with other subjects too. Perhaps when covering the Middle East \ Science \ Medicine they make similar errors, but we are not knowledgable enough to notice those.[/quote:d204f6a295]
Nope. Just read the same story on Al-Jazeera and FOX news, and you know the truth is somewhere in the middle :)Dave
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I was in Darraghs class for the havok project(different team), time was definatly the biggest factor for me, if college wasn’t taking up all of my time I’d love to enter more competitions but sadly I just dont have the time.
Now I dont know if anything went on behind the scenes with havok and colleges.but I think if havok wanted a bigger irish turnout for the competition maybe they could take some time out and go to some of the colleges and discuss the competition discuss there company and how important physics is. If there looking for college graduates that have better knowledge of physics maybe they should work with the colleges more to help them focus and to teach physics for the industry better.
but like I said maybe there is more going on behind the scenes I dont know, all I know is I havent seen any input
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Ah well in fairness Havok are pretty good at going to colleges. They came to Dun loaghaire during my degree years and to Trinity for an in-depth talk and came to our showcase and took genuine interest.
But I think competition should have been communicated early to course directors and worked in as course work as I would have gladly swapped some simpler projects for the comp.
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But I think competition should have been communicated early to course directors and worked in as course work as I would have gladly swapped some simpler projects for the comp.[/quote:dc893ef800]
If you’re saying that entry to the competition should be made part of mandatory coursework, then I think you’d have to consider the implications of students being required – as part of their 3rd level education – to enter a competition which is part of a promotional drive by a for-profit company. Just in terms of educational ideals, could be tricky ground?
Then again, maybe it’s not really that different than teaching people 3dsmax (as opposed to another package) in college, and Havok as successful Irish founded software company deserve support.. -
In Trinity MSc we had a physics module. Learned how to write a basic physics engine and got an intro to bullet, I think using havok would be a good follow on and practical experience for work place. Colleges as you mention already make decisions on teaching technologies/products where there is a company behind them e.g. XNA.
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Feral…there are many fine lines here…for example some universities get equipment or labs sponsored by companies so the students end up using that equipment over other equipment and I have worked in colleges where the technicians would not support some of the equipment used in teaching on core media and design courses saying they had no experience or training with them, both examples would suggest that we (in education) may not be educating our students with sufficient flexibility.)
the focus in universities should always be on core tech and critical skills that can be applied across a lot of technologies and then supplemented with some specifics, but it does not always turn out that way. The focus in ITs is sometimes different, but there is a lot of variation.
I do remember hearing pretty late about the Havok competition so there may have been a communication issue with colleges.
Aphra.
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Great post Feral, lots go good digging there.
Slightly off topic, but does it worry any one else when a news site reports on a game related matter and gets lots of facts wrong? It makes me wonder if they do the same with other subjects too. Perhaps when covering the Middle East \ Science \ Medicine they make similar errors, but we are not knowledgable enough to notice those.[/quote:317b3fd6b9]
Well, I am sure we all remember Fox News doing a report on the game Mass Effect and basically calling it an online rape simulation game, because the reporter had "heard it from some guy".
I remember reading that almost all of the major news stations and newspapers owned by the big six no longer have a fact-checking departments, which would certainly contribute to the number of stories that either contain false information or are entirely fabricated.
Depressingly enough, being entertaining has become more important than being right.
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I don’t think Fox News are seen as a news organisation that sets high standards.. and in some states in the US falsifying the news is not illegal..at least according to ‘The Corporation’ (2005) documentary.
Aphra.[/quote:2c03375e28]
I would certainly agree that Fox don’t have high standards, although it’s important to remember a lot of the population of the USA wouldn’t see it that way – can be interesting having conversations with Americans on this topic.
Way off topic here, but I wasn’t impressed by "The Corporation". I found it interesting sometimes as a historical piece, but while it’s heart was probably in the right place, thought it was was much more sensationalist than balanced. The whole premise of trying to make out that Corporations are analogous to psychopaths I thought was pretty silly, but thats just my .02
I think the court case that’s mentioned actually was lost because the people bringing the case didn’t have whistleblower status, which they claimed to. Far as I can see, the reason they didn’t get whistleblower status was the FCC’s "policy against the intentional falsification of news", is a policy, but not a law, and you only have whistleblower status if an actual defined ‘law’ is being broken. So the court ruled that that the FCCs policy against distorting information wasn’t actually a law.
But at the same time, the FCC, which is a body created by congressional statute, does have a policy against deliberately distorting news, and can take it into account when reviewing licenses.I think it’s a bit of a leap to go from that the court found whistleblower status didn’t apply under the ground it was claimed, to that the court found it was Ok to distort news in the states.
Or at least the details were something like that – think this came up on slashdot years ago… v hard to find accurate information on the case, as it’s carried on lots of crackpot sites… this court judgement seems relatively easy to read though:
http://www.2dca.org/opinion/February%2014,%202003/2D01-529.pdfI shouldn’t really be commenting on stuff like this, it seems very technical stuff, and so I’m way out of my depth…
Where’s Steph, resident legal eagle :-)I guess it’s a pretty complex question as to whether it should even be (criminally) illegal to falsify news, because you get into issues of freedom of the press and burden of proof and where you set the bar of ‘truth’ and stuff like that. Our libel laws here might sometimes mean stuff isn’t published that really ought to be, and maybe those with more ability to sue get reported on less, etc.
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Feral…there are many fine lines here…[…]
[/quote:0aa74d2a50]
Yeah, agree with you on that – I guess that’s what I was trying to say with my original post – you can look at it both ways; but mandating the competition as coursework would definitely be getting close to that line.the focus in universities should always be on core tech and critical skills that can be applied across a lot of technologies and then supplemented with some specifics, but it does not always turn out that way.[/quote:0aa74d2a50]
Definitely agree with this too – have probably posted on that topic before here – but I’d be willing to bet a lot of people would be in favour of more technical training too, you do see calls for graduates with more ‘industry ready’ skills a fair bit. -
I entered that competition… With intentions of completing it also however did not succeed! It quickly turned into more of a electronics project, with a whole new soundcard needed to test and improve the code! But the soundcard never went into development, because of the deadlines and also how time consuming one man coding, thinking, researching, purchasing and soldering is!
You see you could enter the competition under two categories… Innovative Gameplay being one, and a technical one being the other. (They weren’t the correct titles.) So I entered under technical, but essentially all I had was my Basic Electronics assembly pic code and its C++ equivalent but no gamecode or more importantly soundcard to demonstrate my idea!
"Dolby digital 7.1 eat your heart out", I thought! Not with a 36 hour (2nd year engineering) week, good luck!
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whats electronics assembly got to do with havok? Or sound cards for that matter ??
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Just a couple of new sound classes, splitting sound into 8-outputs accordingly. Enabling realtime 3d surround sound basically, but there are no sound cards with 8 outputs to demonstrate this.
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Is 3d surround sound the remit of a physics engine? Sounds like the game / audio engines problem but perhaps in the future it will be as I heard of research to generate dynamic physically based sound before.
Something like specifying the resonance properties of the material and then when the object falls to the ground the physics engine produces the expected sound. Saw a demo with a wooden bowl making a nice wooden sound.
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Is 3d surround sound the remit of a physics engine? Sounds like the game / audio engines problem but perhaps in the future it will be as I heard of research to generate dynamic physically based sound before.
Something like specifying the resonance properties of the material and then when the object falls to the ground the physics engine produces the expected sound. Saw a demo with a wooden bowl making a nice wooden sound.[/quote:f1048611c4]
Interesting… Might be overkill though considering we could get results that sound just as good by using an appropriate wave and some fx. Plus it would take control away from the artists, which might not be appreciated :)
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