Kirklees College has partnered with CityFibre, the UK’s largest independent full fibre platform, to launch an Esports course that will be held at the college’s new state-of-the-art Esports room. The curriculum will include a coding workshop with local BAFTA-nominated game designer, Zach Cundall, and the college ultimately plans to launch its own team.
Competitive online gaming, dubbed Esports, is becoming a huge spectator sport and a growing fixture in households across the UK. It is opening lucrative new career paths for competitive gamers, with some prize-pools in the millions, and attracted over 400 million viewers in 2020.
To support this exciting sector, Kirklees College has established a dedicated Esports room, with the support of CityFibre, that will play host to students on the course and form a base for the Kirklees Esports team. The course will cover all aspects of the gaming industry, including games, teams and tournaments, streaming, planning an event, establishing an eSports organisation, starting an enterprise within the industry and promoting positive health and wellbeing.
As part of the course, CityFibre is funding a coding workshop with BAFTA-nominated game designer and Yorkshire native, Zach Cundall. The suite of content will be delivered via interactive sessions with live chat over Discord and will teach students how to utilise leading 3D creation platform, Unreal Engine.
Furkan Uddin, Curriculum Area Manager for Business Management, IT and Digital Computing at Kirklees College said:
“We are excited to be working in partnership with CityFibre on the launch of our Esports room. Esports is becoming increasingly popular and the introduction of this course has allowed us to expand our offer to reflect the needs of the industry and position ourselves as a leading provider of digital technologies in the region.
This new state-of-the-art room will allow us to create an inspiring learning environment with cutting-edge technology to provide our students with a solid foundation to build a successful gaming career.”
Steve Moore, City Manager at CityFibre, added:
“Esports has truly exploded in popularity in recent years and we’re excited to support Kirklees College as it grows in this space. We are no longer talking about gaming being a niche audience – this is a mainstream industry and it’s great to see this reflected in what Kirklees College offers to its students.
“Beyond financial support we’re also hopeful that the network we’re building in Huddersfield, as well as those across the UK, will play an important role in overcoming poor connectivity barriers for gamers, students and developers alike.”
For more information about the Esports course at Kirklees College, visit https://www.kirkleescollege.ac.uk/16-18/course/?cid=34266