DigiPen Opens Singapore Campus

Officials from the DigiPen Institute of Technology have celebrated the opening of the organization’s new campus in Singapore, its first outside of the U.S. First announced in February of last year, the new campus has been established in cooperation with Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB). The new institute is located in an area of the island city state known as Fusionpolis, a live-work project connecting information technology, communication and media industries. The new campus offers two four-year degree programs at present: Bachelor of Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation (154 credits), which began accepting applications last autumn. A Bachelor of Fine Arts in Production Animation (144 credits) will be offered beginning from this autumn. The first intake of forty students will be overseen by ten teachers, with the campus planning to cater for around one thousand students and eighty teachers within the next eight years. Fees for local students stand at SG$70,200 ($51,400) for each course, around half the price of study at DigiPen’s U.S. campus in Redmond, Washington. Fees for international students are set at SG$81,120 ($59,400). "We have been training ourselves to make sure that we can duplicate the education that we have in the United States here,” said Claude Comair, chairman and president of DigiPen Institute Technology. Singapore has made considerable efforts to increase its support for video games and related industries in recent years, with EDB executive Linda Sein speaking to Gamasutra in a recent interview of a desire to make Singapore a "capital" of digital media development. As such a number of companies have already set up offices in the city state, including Lucasfilm/LucasArts, PopCap, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts and Koei. "As the first top foreign institution in Singapore offering courses in games and animation, DigiPen Singapore will play an integral role in addressing the digital media industry's manpower capabilities needs," said Singaporean minister for trade and industry Lim Hng Klang. "DigiPen Singapore will also work closely with these animation and games companies, forging partnerships for research and the development of new techniques and tools.”