Project Sanitarium: gaming TB: a serious game for a serious problem

Collaborative projects between Industry and Academia provide excellent opportunities for learning. Throughout the academic year 2014-2015 undergraduates from the School of Arts, Media and Computer Games at Abertay University worked with academics from the Infection Group at the University of St Andrews and industry partners Microsoft and DeltaDNA. The result was a serious game prototype that utilized game design techniques and technology to demystify and educate players about the diagnosis and treatment of one of the world's oldest and deadliest diseases, Tuberculosis (TB). Project Sanitarium is a game incorporating a mathematical model that is based on data from real-world drug trials. This paper discusses the project design and development, demonstrating how the project builds on the successful collaborative pedagogical model developed by academic staff at Abertay University. The aim of the model is to provide undergraduates with workplace simulation, wider industry collaboration and access to academic expertise to solve challenging and complex problems.

A network approach to overcoming barriers to market engagement for SMEs in energy efficiency initiatives such as the Green Deal

The Green Deal (GD) was launched in 2013 by the UK Government as a market-led scheme to encourage uptake of energy efficiency measures in the UK and create green sector jobs. The scheme closed in July 2015 after 30 months due to government concerns over low uptake and industry standards but additional factors potentially contributed to its failure such as poor scheme design and lack of understanding of the customer and supply chain journey. We explore the role of key delivery agents of GD services, specifically SMEs, and we use the LoCal-Net project as a case study to examine the use of networks to identify and reduce barriers to SME market engagement. We find that SMEs experienced multiple barriers to interaction with the GD such as lack of access to information, training, and confusion over delivery of the scheme but benefited from interaction with the network to access information, improve understanding of the scheme, increasing networking opportunities and forming new business models and partnerships to reduce risk. The importance of SMEs as delivery agents and their role in the design of market-led schemes such as the GD are discussed with recommendations for improving SME engagement in green sector initiatives.