The creative industry has proved itself to be a lucrative business and it may be an important industry for Malta. The gaming industry, which survived the 2007 recession unscathed, is expected to be worth $68 billion by 2012 worldwide. This is mainly because people have shown the willingness to pay a couple of euros to get several hours of entertainment. Apple's App store together with Nintendo Wii games are typical examples where sales were not affected at all during the financial crisis.

St Martin's Institute of IT, an affiliate institution of the University of London, envisioned this scenario and launched the BSc (Hons) Creative Computing degree in 2006, and is now in its fourth year. St Martin's was the very first institute outside the UK to offer the programme and the first cohort of degree students are graduating this year, in good time for the games companies enquiring with Malta Enterprise to set up shop in Malta. The Creative Computing degree programme gives the students all the basic principles of how to use the computer as a tool to create interactive artifacts and is thus aimed at individuals who are seeking a career in the movie industry, website design and development, audio and music engineering, computer games, computer based gaming and gambling, as well as advertising.

Colour theory is fundamental to any kind of art and the subject is broached in increasing levels of detail across the three years of the degree. Apart from procedural animation, the course also delves into random to rule-based genetic algorithms for animating and generating graphics. 3D graphics and animation starts off with using available API but by the end of the course the student is able to implement a 3D projection, lighting and shadowing system from scratch with knowledge of the underlying algorithms and implementations.

Much of the world gamers try to convey is limited by the human's perceptual organs and brain organics and this course takes this approach in its second year and third year. A close look is taken at the eye and ear organs and how each functions in delivering sensed stimuli to the cognitive system that is the brain. Their capabilities and limitations, coupled with interesting illusionary effects are studied in order to assess what can be done to communicate one's ideas across to the audience.

In the third year, students go a level higher to the brain. Rather than perception of coloured pixels and sounds we now talk of emotional effects that are passed through the use of colours and light in a painting and cognition of music from organized sound. In trying to understand music cognition, models are built to try and emulate the brain in generating music and interacting real-time with musicians.

All this is intertwined with the rest of the computer systems knowledge required to support any robust and usable application: object-oriented programming, software engineering, database systems, security, artificial intelligence and neural networks, data compression and multimedia information retrieval, and design of interactive systems. Apart from the rigour of the syllabus, students are encouraged to take the concepts and take them to the next level and build up their own portfolio, where experimentation is the key. One cannot stress how important this is: The crucial thing when applying for a creative job is showing what you have done and what you have experimented with, i.e. your portfolio. While just having a degree is already a great advantage, a portfolio is something personal, and displays what assets you bring with you to the prospective employer.

In order to push the students to start building their portfolio, St Martin's organises several extracurricular activities such as a Creative Week every November, where students are sent out to capture audio, image and video media on a given specific topic, and within a week present a prototype of how their ideas can be used to generate something innovative that entails a computerized application.

Starting this summer, St Martin's welcomes a visiting game industry veteran to assist in the organisation of students to form game development teams. Game development is multi-disciplinary and needs all aspects of engineering, game design, art design, sound creation, management, programming and marketing. Thus each team will reflect the skills needed in such a games development company and create a game using Microsoft's XNA platform. This is a great platform where developers can also try out their creations on their Xbox, and coming soon also on Windows Phone 7. It will be an exciting experience for the students, their tutors and the visiting professor.

We at St Martin's are investing in our students since we strongly believe that we have got talent in Malta, but as a nation we need to believe in our students' capabilities in bringing high quality entertainment products, such as games, to the rest of the world.

Mr Barbara is the head of the Computing & Information Systems Department and Mr Attard is a lecturer in Creative Computing & Programming at St Martin's Institute of IT.