The Student Hero award highlights current games students who have demonstrated a positive impact with their fellow students over the past 12 months. We want to showcase the students who are the doing the most to support, progress and inspire their peers through a range of pro-active and supportive activities.

These are the students that actively strive to learn more, are happy to help and share their knowledge, who are always trying new things and new approaches, and who probably already have an impressive portfolio of projects & activities both as part of coursework & as extra-curricular work.

This year had some fantastic nominations, these were cut down to a shortlist of 6 finalists who were then judged by our fantastic panel. This years finalists:

• Alain Snow (City University of London)
• Ayotunde Norman-Williams (City University of London
• Elizabeth Midgley (University of Hull)
• Hannah Jacob (Nottingham Trent University)
• Kay Volbeda (HKU)
• Peter Lampard (Nottingham Trent University)

Following deliberation by our judging panel, we can now reveal that in their expert decision the winner of this years award is Hannah Jacob of Nottingham Trent University.

Hannah is currently in her second year studying computer science games technology at NTU and has already proven herself to be a dedicated, enthusiastic and hard-working individual. As well as her own individual studies, she also mentors first year students as well as playing a key role in running the developer society.

Here are just some of her key achievements and activities:

• Acts as the lead instructor for Code First Girls as well as a repository to students and other instructors
• Involved in running numerous workshops, challenges and talks as part of the Developer Society.
• Takes on the role of teaching assistant in programming classes.
• Came 3^rd overall in HackNotts 2020
• Ran the quarantine game jam for international students moving to the UK that need to self-quarantine

We feel that Hannah has proven to be an excellent example to her fellow students and is destined for a great career in the games industry, a massive congratulations from the Grads in Games team.