Third Game Tech Academy partner meeting in Aalborg
Project partner, Aalborg University Student Entrepreneurship, welcomed the Game Tech Academy consortium to sunny Aalborg. On April 1st and 2nd 2025, we ditched April fools and instead dedicated our time to working on the next steps to take as a group when we met for your third in-person partnership meeting.
Time to get our hands dirty
How do you make the best of the limited time you have together in one room? Don’t get us wrong, we do love the flexibility and instant exchange online meetings offer. However, meeting in person just hits different. That’s why we decided to optimise our use of time during the partnership meeting by holding a collective preparatory meeting online prior to meeting in Aalborg.
This way, everyone was updated on the status and plans for each part of the project, by each partner, and we could delve into the topics and questions that needed discussing.
What AI-tools can do vs. what they are used for
Game Tech Academy’s researchers have been and will continue to work on mapping the use of AI in game testing in an effort to identify where the state of the research in this field meets game developers’ practices on a daily basis. Expanding on this, we will engage game students and teachers in the research to better understand their attitudes towards learning, teaching, and using automatic and AI-aided game testing tools.
Furthermore, we will continue our applied research on the AI tools for game testing itself. Here, we are putting an emphasis on itsuse for the generally labour-intensive testing of narrative games.
Exploring new avenues for exchange across disciplines and borders
Another central question of any Interreg project is how to best facilitate cross-border exchange and collaboration that makes sense and is valuable for all participants. Game Tech Academy is not exempt from this challenge, which we tackled from different directions within the different activities of our project.
During this partnership meeting, we placed a dedicated focus on how to adjust and improve our educational offers for the students at the GTA-partners in ways which foster and motivate exchange. Not just across national and organisational borders, but also across the invisible borders between different study programmes.
Some central points that resulted from our discussions during the partnership meeting were:
- Presentation matters: We want to reflect and rethink the format in which we present content to students, as well as other target groups.
- Integration: Especially longer courses need to be well-integrated into the students’ existing schedule.
- Lowering hurdles: Collaborative projects with other students or industry-partners should be as natural a choice as regular courses.
- Challenge-driven: We want to facilitate the collaboration of companies and other organisations in Denmark with students in Sweden and vice versa. This way, we hope to present interesting game tech cases to our students and connect companies/organisations with the exact talent they’re looking for.
Are you a company or public/non-profit organisation faced with a challenge or just curious about how game technologies could aid innovation in your context?
…and let us find the right talent for you!
Innovative ideas need innovative mentoring
Before, during, and following this partnership meeting, we have been in an active, self-critical debate on whether we as business and start-up coaches can provide game tech startups with the best mentoring possible. From our continuous work on a Scandinavian model for entrepreneurship with(in) game technology, as well as from working with startups, we have learned that:
- That one game tech startup/company doesn’t exist. We are looking at a diverse group.
- Some of the tools we use in our consulting with startups teams need to be adjusted to better account for the unique situations many game tech innovators find themselves in.
During this partnership meeting, we manifested the need for further insights into the existing landscape of game tech companies. Furthermore, we had the chance to get more concrete on which insights and skills the coaches in our networks need to be prepared for supporting interdisciplinary startups that utilise game technologies to solve a number of challenges in various industries.
We want to get better at supporting talents in turning their ideas and skills into solutions.
We want to improve the way we introduce students and professionals from non-technical backgrounds to how they can contribute to game tech-driven innovation.
Welcome to new team members
This partnership meeting furthermore gave us the opportunity to officially welcome three new GTA-experts IRL:
Vania Castagnino Ugolotti and Kristina Björkman, both Business Coaches at Science Park Skövde
and Uffe Wedsgaard Koch, Business Developer at Aalborg University Innovation
Contact
With questions about Game Tech Academy, please contact Luisa Geitmann-Mügge at luisa.geitmann-mugge@aalborg.dk.
