Application process

To apply simply start by writing an e-mail to Alex Vanden Abeele, who will contact you for a first intake meeting. During this meeting we’ll discuss your project, your needs and your end goal to match it with our own needs and goals for our projects.

After this meeting based on your project’s needs, you should send this application document via e-mail. The deadline to send the document is always the end of August, but we advise to send it earlier to give us time to review it and contact you if there are additional questions.

At the start of the semester a jury will select which group project proposals can be executed by the students from the submitted proposals. The number of approved projects is limited by the number of students in the 3rd year. (For example, if we have 100 students in the 3rd year we will approve 20 projects and no more.)

We generally have more projects than needed, so please be aware that it is possible that we do not select your project.

A lot of our students are not from Belgium and follow the English version of our curriculum, it is therefore important that you write the proposal document in English, we will also use this document to communicate details of the project to our students.

What can you expect from us?

DAE provides coaches and supervisors for the teams that have weekly meetings with the students and help them in their work. We facilitate them in their needs and work with them to a successful end.

The goal of this course is to end with a “vertical slice” of a product, a prototype, a concept. DAE teachers will guide students toward this goal. However, we cannot guarantee a result; students can fail this course and end with no result at all.

What do we expect from you?

To be approved we first need that application document. Once approved we expect you to give a pitch presentation of the project at the start of the semester.

Students work on the projects for 11 weeks, in close collaboration with teachers, but also with you. We need a contact person who is available for the students troughout the execution of the project.

At the end the students pitch the project to you and all other clients and students, we expect you to be at that event.

Hardware

Students have a decent gaming laptop to develop of their own. If your project requires extra hardware (such as VR headsets for example), we kindly request that you provide the devices. We have some hardware of our own, but we recommend that you provide us with yours because

  • The project will be developed on the correct hardware, it’s not sure that we have the same devices as you have, so they might be incompatible.
  • At the end of the project, you’ll get the hardware back with the project pre-installed; if we use our own hardware, you’ll have to install the project on your device yourself, which might have issues.

The hardware is insured by the school’s insurance policy if the hardware remains in the school building and is kept locked when not used. Students always need to leave their ID with us when they borrow the hardware for the project.

Cost

Once a project has been accepted and will be executed by our students, we ask for a small fee that covers our infrastructure costs, mentorship and transfer of IP. This cost depends on the size and form of your company/organization. Feel free to contact Alex for more info and details about this.