Cambridge, UK and Beijing, China, May 11, 2016 - The ARM® University Program is offering a new mobile gaming education kit to address the pressing demand for game technology developers. The kit has been developed collaboratively with two mobile gaming industry leaders, Chukong Technologies and Rockchip to cover key topics including GPU architecture, OpenGL® ES and game development through the use of Cocos2d-x.
"The ARM University Program actively supports curriculum reform and development and we are continuously creating new teaching materials, professional platforms and tools to help our partners respond to an ever-changing industry," said Khaled Benkrid, director of education, worldwide university program, ARM. "The mobile gaming market has enormous potential as many games now use mobile as a primary platform. ARM's new gaming education kit will help propel that growth by enabling students to get early access to industry standard technologies and tools."
The kit is being introduced as a response to significant changes taking place in the game industry. Driven by the increase in mobile gaming and devices with higher performance and lower power consumption, it has become essential for companies to develop their games from a 'mobile first' perspective. Porting PC games to a mobile device will no longer suffice. This transition requires universities to respond quickly by giving young software engineers the skills to meet new industry demand.
The kit has already been adopted by Peking University, Beijing Institute of Technology and Xiamen University and is expected to be rolled out across more universities in the future.
"With gaming development on mobile devices becoming more mainstream, we are facing the challenge of curriculum reform," said professor Qixun Zhang, School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University. "The mobile gaming teaching materials provided by ARM, Chukong Technologies and Rockchip are essential to this transformation and will help to equip our students with the key techniques required for mobile game development and future innovation."
Rockchip provides the ARM Cortex®-A17 and ARM Mali™-T764 based RK3288 development kit to the program. Chukong Technologies' Cocos2d-x will be used as an example to teach and develop game engine and graphics processing.
"Our mobile game development industry is growing at a colossal rate, so it's imperative that students and developers are exposed to the underlying technologies," said Mr. Zhiyuan Li, CEO of Chukong Technologies. "Chukong's OpenGL ES cross platform open source Cocos2D-x plays a critical role in this kit for game engine design teaching. The students will have access to one of the industry's most widely used development tools, helping them to understand and experience the latest working procedures. As an outcome of their studies, they will be able to realize their own innovative potential."
"Together with Chukong Technologies, Rockchip's RK3288 development kit plays a significant role in the development of the ARM mobile gaming education kit," said Mr. Feng Chen, senior vice president, Rockchip. "RK3288 is based on Mali-T764 GPU, ARM's third-generation Midgard architecture, with AFBC, ASTC and TE technologies and Rockchip's advanced memory compression technology. We believe that RK3288's powerful graphics capabilities will offer the universities a new level of teaching and a learning experience provided with hands-on opportunities of multi-products options."
The mobile gaming education kit has been designed to cover the key topics at the forefront of this area, including 3D modeling, shader programming, sprites texturing and lighting, game design basics such as animation, sound creation, physics and user interaction, as well as virtual reality game design. In addition, all course modules will be accompanied by a hands-on lab experiment project.
To find out more about this initiative along with ARM's comprehensive educational solutions, please visit: www.arm.com/support/university
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