News

IT Carlow Students Display their Computer Games Project at the Cannes International Festival of Games

25/02/2012

Two of IT Carlow’s 3rd year Computer Games Development students, Keith Cully, age 23, from Sallins, Co Kildare and Ronan Farrell, age 21, from Wexford, recently travelled to the  prestigious International Festival of Games in Cannes to demonstrate their computer game project ‘Turbo Trolley Racers’.   This annual event attracted more than 170,000 visitors catering for all aspects of the gaming industry and was held at the famous Palais des Festivals (home of the Cannes Film Festival).

Keith Cully described the narrative of their game “In the near future government space agencies are forced out of business by the rise of cheap commercial spaceflight. This leads to many rocket engineers losing their jobs. One daring unemployed engineer decides to live out his childhood dream of attaching a rocket engine to a shopping trolley. Nobody could have predicted that this would spawn the worldwide phenomenon that is Turbo Trolley Racing.”

During the festival, the IT Carlow students shared a stand with Master’s Degree students from the University of Nice, who are specialising in project management in innovative games.  As part of this collaboration, the two IT Carlow students will develop a joint project with the French Master’s degree students.  In particular, the Carlow students will play the role of games developers on a large multi-cultural, inter-disciplinary team as part of their final year project at IT Carlow.

During the festival the Turbo Trolley Racers game registered huge interest from the visitors especially from younger children who played the game with their parents.   Keith and Ronan indicated that this was an excellent way to test out the target demographic for their game.  In addition, the Carlow and Nice students exchanged many games development ideas and concepts for their upcoming collaborative projects next year.  This exciting opportunity for the IT Carlow students would not have been possible without the support of Nigel Whyte, Head of Department of Computing and Networking, IT Carlow, who sees international collaboration of this nature as a key aspect of our future role as a Technological University.

The esteem in which the IT Carlow course is held is very evident in that its 4th year students are deemed to have the appropriate computer games development skills to act as programmers on second year Master’s degree projects in the University of Nice.  The coordinator of the French Master’s degree Dr Thierry Pitarque stated “This is a very exciting collaboration with our Irish colleagues and we hope it will grow every year.”   In this regard Dr Dunican and Dr Pitarque are currently putting together a joint research proposal in the area of using innovative games technology to support collaborative learning.

The participation of IT Carlow students at this event was the brainchild of Dr Enda Dunican, Lecturer in the Computing and Networking Department and emerged as part of an Erasmus collaboration between IT Carlow and the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (Polytech Nice-Sophia).

In addition, the department of Computing and Networking would like to thank the students from the University of Nice for providing the Irish students with free accommodation and transport for the weekend.

ENDS

For further information please contact:
Paula Butler, Communications Officer, IT Carlow
t: 059 9175083