In February 2021, a game development club was opened on the basis of the Software Department, the Institute of Computer Science and Information Technologies, Lviv Polytechnic, with the support of the IT company N-iX. It has successfully operated to teach students the basics of the Unreal Engine 4 game engine. The Department and N-iX are interested in further cooperation to train specialists in the development of games and interactive systems in virtual reality.
Volodymyr Shafran, Unreal Engine Developer at N-iX, talks how the developers created and implemented an introductory course on Unreal Engine at Lviv Polytechnic.
How it all started
Professor Dmytro Fedasiuk, Lviv Polytechnic, addressed N-iX and offered cooperation in teaching the virtual reality. During the discussion, an ambitious idea emerged to help launch a course that would introduce the tools for creating games and virtual reality to students of the Software Department and make it possible to acquire practical skills of project development using UE4. This was interesting for us because at the end of the course, these students will be ready for an internship or junior specialist interview at N-iX (or any other company).
Conclusions
We did not set a goal to develop the course for a certain period of time, but rather, we wanted to measure how much time we need to teach it. In the end, it took 40 hours (10 weeks for 2 classes), and it was possible because we worked with students who were super motivated and knew C++.
Based on the results of the «course works», we have already offered job in N-iX to three students.
I hope that the course developed by us will really help Lviv Polytechnic to launch a powerful Unreal Engine direction and train qualified specialists who will become our colleagues in N-iX in the future. After all, there is always a need for cool Unreal Engine developers!
More details are in the article Як розробники запустили курс з Unreal Engine у виші on the website of the community of programmers DOU.