Master of Science in Computer Games Development

at Manchester Metropolitan University United Kingdom

Our BSc (Hons) Biology degree offers the chance to gain a solid grounding in the biological sciences – with the flexibility to develop your own interests and learn about the areas and aspects of biological sciences that match your career ambitions.

Study biology at Manchester Met and you’ll begin by learning the fundamentals of the subject, before exploring the areas that interest you most through a variety of option units. Along the way, you’ll explore the issues that shape our world and touch our lives – from molecular biology, microbiology and genetics, to ecology, animal behaviour, biodiversity and conservation.

The program also allows you to develop your own interests in areas such as comparative anatomy and physiology, plant science, brain and behaviour, population biology, biotechnology, biochemistry and the conservation of biodiversity, to tailor your learning to your career aspirations.

In our laboratories, you’ll get to grips with the latest equipment, as we help you develop a range of practical skills that you can take into your career. And, by getting out in the field, you can learn about biology out in the real world – whether in the UK or overseas.

Our biology degree also provides the option of spending an extra year expanding your horizons, either studying with one of our partner universities overseas, or working on a placement with a business or non-governmental organisation.

Study Abroad
The four-year study abroad route gives you the opportunity to study overseas during your third year in Europe, North America or Australasia.

Music and sound design is a field that mixes the artistic and the technical to produce the vital ingredient for a range of media. On the one hand, it’s a discipline of creative composition and emotional interpretation. On the other, it’s about harnessing the latest technology and studio techniques to produce compelling music and sound content. Our course offers the chance to learn both sides, letting you explore your creative passions while equipping you for a career in the fast-paced digital arts and media sector.

The School of Digital Arts aims to prepare you for a career in the creative sector. It’s home to a dynamic community that spans skills and approaches, creating a space for collaboration and experimentation. And, as well as the human element, this is a space for technical skills, equipped with industry-standard tools and technology.

More than a purpose-built school, we also have the perfect setting. Manchester is a city at the forefront of the creative and digital sector in the UK (second only to London), home to a wide variety of broadcasters, creative agencies and media businesses. More importantly, it’s also one of the world’s musical capitals – much like Detroit and a handful of others. This is a city known around the world for its thriving, distinctive music scene.

Study with us and you’ll have the chance to tap into this vibrant city, making the most of our links with Scruff of the Neck, Louder Than War and other key promoters, labels and venues, not to mention youth music organisations, DJ educators, schools and cultural producers. With the chance to learn from, and connect with, these key figures and organisations, we offer the chance to study in a city that provides an ideal starting point for building your network, developing your experience and starting your career.

Placement options

SODA Placement Year
As part of your studies with SODA, you will have the chance to take a year working on placement within the industry. During your year, you will spend at least 36 weeks working within an organisation in the industry, developing workplace skills, practical understanding and genuine industry experience.

From evolutionary development to environmental stimuli, animal behaviour is shaped by a range of factors. This masters course is your chance to explore them all – not only developing the theoretical principles of behaviour, but also learning how to harness these principles to tackle real-world animal welfare and conservation issues.

It’s an area that covers a diverse range of disciplines, from a strong numerical approach in the classroom to a practical approach in the lab and in the field. While the course is built around strong core units, it also offers the flexibility to explore specialist areas, such as genetics and GIS.

Above all, this is a course that offers the chance to study animal behaviour up close. As well as a field trip to Poland, Ecuador or Tanzania, your dissertation project could take you to Kenya, the Philippines or Mauritius (not to mention sites across the UK) for your research.

As well as expert analytical abilities and practical research techniques, you’ll leave us with an in-depth understanding of animals physiology, and how experience and environment combine to create behaviour – everything you need to pursue a range of career paths, from animal management to education or further research.

As a social worker, you’ll often be in complex and challenging situations but you’ll help to improve lives and bring about social change through working in partnership with individuals, families and communities.

Working within health and social care teams, and with partner agencies, from the police to housing services, you will help to promote human rights and social justice. It can be difficult to appreciate the difference social workers make until you’ve experienced social work practice in action – and that’s why you’ll complete placements in your second and third years.

Our BA (Hons) Social Work course is approved by Social Work England*. This means, when you graduate, you can apply for professional registration with Social Work England to practice as a registered social worker.

Some of the topics you’ll explore include how to communicate with service users and carers, theories to inform practice and the factors that influence our journeys from pre-birth through to death.

Social work can be difficult and challenging at times and, as well as developing your academic knowledge, we aim to develop your resilience and help you learn ways to manage the situations you’re faced with.

This course is at the forefront of production design and manufacturing practices and brings together students from creative and technical backgrounds, to foster original approaches to product design for manufacture. It supports you to explore and develop personal design methodologies and philosophies, and locate these within a deep understanding of historical, contemporary and future design practices, and wider social and cultural contexts.

You will undertake core units, delivered by production design specialists, consisting of design theory and practice lectures, material and manufacturing workshops, group seminars, individual tutorials, live external projects, and research study trips. Practical design development is supported by extensive hand and machine workshops for wood, metal, ceramics, glass and plastics, and digital workshops for laser cutting and large scale CNC routing.

Optional units facilitate innovative cross-disciplinary opportunities, supporting the development of collaborative working with students from within the material making and manufacturing cluster of MA/MSc/MFA Craft and MA/MSc/MFA Textile, and across the wider postgraduate design community. There are cross-faculty options to study within the faculty of “Science and Engineering”, acquiring advanced 3D CAD skills for industrial production, and utilising the latest advanced 3D printing processes. The Manchester Metropolitan Business School option addresses commercial aspects of design, enabling students to locate their ambitions within a defined financial model.

You will able to explore and challenge all aspects of product design, embracing opportunities for innovation across markets and production levels, from one-off making and batch fabrication, to flexible digital manufacture and high volume industrial production.

Sustainability is at the forefront of a global agenda. From how it influences individuals’ decision making, to the impact it has on the strategic direction of multinational organisations.

With the growing recognition of sustainability as a core business practice, there’s no better time to study a postgraduate management degree with sustainability at its heart.

Developing your career
On this course you’ll gain a thorough introduction to management practices, studying alongside students on our long-standing MSc Management course. Here you’ll explore units on organisational strategy and supply chain, amongst others, to give you key insights into various areas of business, management and leadership.

As the focus of your studies, you’ll also have the opportunity to learn about sustainability and sustainable development, studying specialist units looking at topics such as the circular economy and social, ethical and environmental challenges. You’ll then work towards completing a sustainability research project on a topic of your choice.

The School of Digital Art's (SODA) MA Photography course provides a dynamic opportunity for you to test, push and extend the current boundaries of the photographic medium. You will explore photography through the medium’s rich critical and technological contexts, and develop your creative practice in line with your individual interests and professional ambitions.  

As an MA Photography student you will be part of SODA, where you will study in an environment that is purpose-built for today’s fast-moving creative and digital sectors. It will offer boundary-breaking and cross-disciplinary learning opportunities that reflects modern project-based working practices. It offers the opportunity to collaborate with a dynamic creative community of sound designers, filmmakers, games developers and more. SODA is also home to staff from a wide range of disciplines, who are research active and experts in their chosen area and who enjoy well-established links to the wider creative media, arts and digital tech industries.

In addition to established photographic technologies, you will also have access to a wide range of new digital equipment and facilities, including photographic studios, sound studios, green screen spaces, moving image studios and immersive spaces and technologies.

During the program, you will develop professional links with the creative community and industries both locally, nationally and internationally. For students and creative media professionals alike, SODA is well-positioned within Manchester as a great place for building a network and developing your research and practice in the media, games and digital tech industries.

BA (Hons) Filmmaking is a practice-based course giving you the creative freedom to develop your voice through the dynamic language of film.

Our learning environment incorporates a unique mix of digital art and film school philosophies, empowering you to express your ideas and stories through narrative fiction, documentary, artists’ moving image and new media. You will specialise in original ideas from unique perspectives, with the potential for your work to be screened in international venues.

Studying at the School of Digital Arts means learning beyond the usual limits. You’ll be part of a vibrant creative community that spans a range of disciplines, from photography and animation, to music and sound design. It’s an environment designed for collaboration – a place where you can push the boundaries of filmmaking, explore the directions that interest you most and develop a broad skill set made for today’s digital arts and media sector. Here, you’ll have access to a vast range of specialist resources and purpose-built facilities, as well as a wealth of opportunities for developing your professional skills, from work experience placements and industry competitions to guest lectures and collaborations with organisations.

The UK film and television industry is a global success story and Manchester is the perfect place to write your own chapter. It’s a major media city, second only to London. The likes of the BBC and ITV are on our doorstep at MediaCityUK, while the city is also home to a thriving, bustling digital production sector, from innovative start-ups to established production companies. For today, that means you’ll have the chance to work on live industry projects – developing practical skills and valuable experience. For tomorrow, that means you’ll graduate in one of the most exciting cities in Europe for starting a career in the creative and digital industries.

Placement options

SODA Placement Year
As part of your studies with SODA, you will have the chance to take a year working on placement within the industry. During your year, you will spend at least 36 weeks working within an organisation in the industry, developing workplace skills, practical understanding and genuine industry experience.

Our BA (Hons) Product Design and Craft course has a material-led, experimental philosophy that pursues a thinking through making approach to design, supporting the development of personal creative agendas. Through a program of study that explores our understanding of the material world, you will learn how to be a designer and maker of objects that enhance our daily interactions. You will develop essential skills in creative thinking and design strategy, and then apply these to challenge how you design for product and for craft.

You will discover how to design and produce objects that embrace both traditional handmade approaches and contemporary machine and digital manufacturing. Through creative experimentation, we strive to give ideas a material voice, as the thinking behind an object and its material execution are of equal importance. Your design work will also look to address a diverse range of areas including social issues, global awareness and local demand by considering the objects you design and the materials and processes you use. This course will enable you to explore strategies, materials and processes so you can develop creative and professional skills to support a sustainable career in design and craft making.

There is politics in almost everything we do. It is the study of power: who gets it, why they seek it and by what means they obtain it. Its principal focus is on power relations among individuals, social groups and nations. Studying history will help you to understand how the past affects every aspect of our lives - from the language we speak, to the politics of race, gender, religion and identity. This Joint Honours degree will provide you with the skills to explore the social and political landscape of human consciousness throughout time and place. You will discover how people lived, and how they perceived and interacted with the world around them. Investigating past events, you will encounter war, injustice, new frontiers, political upheaval, ancient civilisations, invasions, conspiracies, catastrophes and revolutions. You will gain a firm grasp of political and current affairs, understand the news headlines, seeing beyond them to the real issues of politics, and be in a better position to comment upon and understand what the politicians are really saying.

The Joint Honours degree offers you an opportunity to study two subjects at degree level, enabling you to benefit from high quality teaching across more than one subject.

A wide variety of options means that you can pursue your own interests – with increasing flexibility as you progress through the course. With practical skills training, including advanced analytical approaches, – this degree opens up doors to a range of interesting and rewarding career possibilities and provides the skills needed to progress to higher research programs.

Placement options

You may have the chance to spend a year getting a taste of professional life. It is an opportunity to develop core skills and explore how this course can relate to the graduate world. It shows employers that you’re ready to get to work.

Students are free to choose Placement opportunities from a wide range of roles both in the UK and abroad. Students choosing this option are supported by a dedicated placement team who provide links to employers through presentations, events, and fairs, and provide a specialist program of guidance on recruitment procedures including CV and interview preparation, as well as work readiness and working overseas.