This year's Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) award is to take place in London on Thursday 29 November. Film and Digital Media Exchange Project Manager within the Cambridge School of Art, Media and Film Studies, Saint John Walker, has been short listed for the THES Widening Participation Initiative of the Year award. He has been nominated for his work in getting gaming enthusiasts into higher education through a series of initiatives devised to breed new talent for the animation, film, television and computer gaming sectors.

He identified that, while Cambridge is full of gaming entrepreneurs and hot-product innovation, the city had no way of producing home-grown gaming talent. There were no creative games degrees and no way for young people from the area to get involved in making games. As part of his role within the Film Digital Media Exchange (FDMX), he set about looking for ways to widen participation.

The launch of the BA in Computer Gaming and Visual Effects in October 2006 was at the centre of this widening participation initiative, written by Saint John after consulting key companies from the sector, such as Sony, EA and Codemasters and film visual effects giant, Moving Picture Company.

He also set up a competition, Next-Next Gen, open to all young people from the region that asked them to visualise what the computer games of the future would look like. At the same time, he helped to set up a games educators' network across the East of England to enable education providers to promote courses, share resources and discuss training issues. FDMX has now purchased a motion capture rig, to be used collectively by network members, to bring students up to speed with their counterparts in the industry.