Getting certified as serious games professionals

This summer two Finnish universities Kajaani University of Applied Sciences and Oulu University of Applied Sciences teamed up and created online studies on serious gaming and gamification. This awesome project has currently resulted in three online courses, all of those were available for everyone and for free this summer 2017. And we took them all! 

This year summer was no different from previous years here in Helsinki – it can be summed up by saying that summer was the nicest day of the year. But this summer something was different from previous ones.

This summer two Finnish universities Kajaani University of Applied Sciences and Oulu University of Applied Sciences teamed up and created online studies on serious gaming and gamification. This awesome project has currently resulted in three online courses, all of those were available for everyone and for free this summer 2017. These courses are especially valuable because Finnish serious games industry is growing rapidly and with more and more people involved in the industry, accessible knowledge and training is a must.

More information about this project can be found on SeGaBu (Serious Games Platform for Business and Education) course website and on their blog. Our team attended all of those courses, some of us took all three, some two or one. But most importantly, we learned a lot during the summer. Below you can see an overview of the knowledge our team gained.

Basics of Serious Games (5 ects)

This online course was for getting familiar with the concept and the development process of serious games and gamification. How to act in the product owner’s role in a serious games development project. We learned about methodology for developing game ideas and about the technological perspective. With the knowledge gained from this course, our team was able to develop our background theoretical concepts further as the course gave a nice overview of previous research findings, some of those new to us

Game and Gamification Design (5 ects) This course was all about designing a serious game –  getting familiar with the game design process and the work of a game designer. We learned how the game design documents are properly created and used to support the game development. We received valuable feedback from peers on our solution and it helped us to progress on a conceptual level.

Serious Games and Business (5 ects) Getting familiar with different aspects of serious games business. Learning a different kind of monetization and funding possibilities for serious games. Finding out the distribution channels for serious games. This course gave us valuable new information on funding opportunities here in Finland and helped us to discuss further on monetization and distribution channels of our solution.

Summer was a success! Our team is now certified in the field.