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What is ICT iMedia?

hi. im in year nine and im choosing my options soon. I wanna become a game designer. I was wondering if anyone knows what the course 'ICT iMedia' is and what you do in it because i want to do digital artwork and 3d modelling and all that.
are you talking about the OCR course Creative iMedia? I'm studying that at GCSE.
Original post by 1hpremaining
are you talking about the OCR course Creative iMedia? I'm studying that at GCSE.

honestly idk if its OCR. but please tell me what you do just in case.
Original post by stickylobster
honestly idk if its OCR. but please tell me what you do just in case.

The first thing you should note is that (I don't have exact numbers on this since I've forgotten, so I'm just guessing) the course is something like 25% exam and 75% coursework. Coursework takes up the majority of both years of the GCSE and there's only one exam which is at the end of your first year of taking the course. If you pass the exam and don't feel the need to resit, you don't need to do a single more exam for the entirety of the course. Brilliant if you hate exams. I personally found the exam to be pretty easy, too. The majority of the exam doesn't really require a lot of revision, in my experience - you walk in, you're given a few questions on technical terms and then you're given a prompt and are required to utilise knowledge of pre- production skills (such as visualisation diagrams, moodboards, mindmaps, scripts and storyboards) that you've learnt throughout the course to complete the questions. For example, IIRC, in my exam I was given a question on drawing a mindmap and visualisation diagram (basically a sketch) for a front cover of a comic about a made-up superhero. It's very simple. Then the last question (always) is a page-long extended piece of writing where you have to evaluate the suitability of said prompt. It's all stuff you'll learn about in the course and it's honestly very easy. I got a D* (i.e distinction star / 90%+ equivalent) with a night's revision.

The downside to there only being one exam, of course, is that there's a sh*t ton of coursework - I'm talking a lot. Expect to stay behind after school a lot of days. Expect to come in on weekends. I can't talk too specifically about the coursework and expect it to relate to you as the coursework changes every year and there's a lot of optional modules that your teachers will choose to keep or omit, but I'll talk about my experience and what I had to do anyway. Our first-year coursework involved creating a poster for this theoretical game called TimeChaser. You make a logo for the made-up company, collect assets (photos etc) from the internet and then work on Photoshop over the course of a couple of weeks in order to create the poster. This part of the coursework was fun - I enjoyed it. But sadly this part doesn't take up the majority of the coursework and the rest of it is tedious AF. You have to plan out your poster first. This involves making moodboards, visualisation diagrams, mindmaps - all the pre-production skills I mentioned above. Then you've gotta write essays on file formats, types of digital graphics eg bitmap/raster and vector, legislations etc. Then, once you've made the poster, you have to write an essay on evaluating it eg what you did well and what you didn't. This part isn't fun, but it's easy. I was able to score a top mark with my coursework as well.

My second year of the GCSE involves creating a website and then doing the same essay-writing tasks. With experience in the bag from first year, I find it's way easier to write these extended pieces and it takes soooo much less time, which is good.

Overall it's a very (very) good course for becoming a game designer. While you don't exactly make any games (or I didn't, in my experience - but like I said, there's optional modules your teachers can add in or omit - including modules like 3d character and map design), it teaches you a lot about planning and how to communicate well with clients. You also learn a lot of pre-production elements which are absolutely essential for the career you want to follow. I'd recommend it, especially if you don't like exams - which I don't.
ok thats good. i checked my options form and it said (OCR Cambridge Nat) so i think its the same :-)

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