Recently we announced our VR Summer Academy, which was made possible through our collaboration with Make School. UploadVR’s mission is to accelerate the success of the virtual reality industry and education is a key part of making that happen. Talking to VR companies in the Bay Area, it quickly became obvious there was a shortage of developers with the skills needed for VR. Ask any tech company, VR or not, and you’ll find that skilled developers are hard to come by, especially due to higher education’s general lack of practical development knowledge.
Enter Make School, founded in 2012 with the goal of creating a replacement for the Computer Science degree. In just 4 short years, they’ve been able to teach hundreds of students via 2-3 month summer camps, a two-year degree program, and university-partnered curriculum (yes, you can earn MIT credits by taking a course made by Make School). Topics include Intro Coding, Game Development, Mobile App Development and more.
Given Make School’s pedigree at the forefront of higher education, you can imagine our delight upon discovering their San Francisco headquarters is directly next door to our new VR coworking space, the Upload Collective. It takes literally 40 steps to exit our office and enter Make School’s SF location (we measured). With VR such a hot new industry, Make School was as excited by the idea of a VR course as we were, and thus the VR Summer Academy was born.
Make School continues to build the future of higher education via practical project based learning, while we provide VR development expertise, industry speakers, and networking opportunities for the course’s students. This initial class of 30 students is just a first step in what we hope will be an international VR education program. The future of the VR industry will be driven by developers, so we’ll continue to do all we can to train and empower creative and thoughtful people. Given the applications so far, it looks like we’re off to a good start.
You can apply to the VR Summer Academy here for 2 months of intensive Unity VR development learning in the heart of San Francisco, next door to the world’s first VR-only coworking space and surrounded by VR industry leaders. We’re also offering a 3-day intro to Unity Vive development for those who want to get their feet wet.
