What do virtual reality innovators, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Mr. Roger’s studio have in common? All three were part of an amazing weekend honoring the winners of the 4th annual National STEM Video Game Challenge! Ten students and their families celebrated their achievements this past weekend in Pittsburgh, PA, home of this year’s regional spotlight. The events aimed to show the winners how to channel their passions into purpose and how to use that purpose on a meaningful pathway to a STEM-related career.

The weekend’s fun began with a question: what happens when the video game winners make physical games? As part of all STEM Challenge workshops, students are taught that video games are systems that are based on the same elements as board games, sports, and more, and asked to build a game out of a grab-bag of random household objects. Therefore, as an ice-breaker, winners were divided into four teams in order to make their own games: middle school winners, high school winners, and their respective parents.

Through this activity, the students grew close and all of the participants realized the connections between physical games and systems thinking principles. Creating games also gave the winners’ parents a greater sense of the difficulty involved with creating even the simplest game. One commented, “You know, I thought it was cool that my son won the competition, but I don’t think I realized how rewarding it can be to create something or that making a game is actually a lot like a science experiment!”

After creating their own games, the winners and their families went to visit Demo Day at the Schell Games studio. Demo Day allows all of the teams at Schell let their coworkers playtest what they’ve been working on. As explained by Christopher Arnold, General Counsel at Schell Games, the studio creates transformational games, or “experiences that help transform the players in a meaningful way.” This idea of transformational games helped one winner, Olivia Thomas, “think about how I can use my designs to make players feel or behave after the play them.” Olivia, eager to learn more about careers in gaming, leaped at the chance to ring the Schell gong which officially opens Demo Day.

Let the games begin!

The students then met with professional designers to learn about career pathways, see their creations, and have fun. After the event, the students were buzzing with excitement about game design careers. When one designer said he either wanted to be a game designer or a doctor, Zack Harmon exclaimed, “After seeing that place, how could you want to work anywhere else?”

That evening, the students unwound at a Pittsburgh Pirates game. For many, it was their first baseball game and a chance to see how a different game system operates. One commented, “I still don’t really like sports, but I think they’re a good example of a really well thought out game design, and I guess that’s cool!” We think our winners brought good juju to help the Pirates, who wound up winning in the 10th inning!

Winners and their parents holding up a Pirates shirt!

The next morning, winners went to the final celebration: a formal awards ceremony and family game day at WQED studios, the studio where Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and Carmen Sandiego were filmed! Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games and a professor at Carnegie Mellon, keynoted the event, remarking that the people who succeed are the ones who have a passion and are brave enough to chase it down! He offered the students a new mantra, and reminded them that school can only take them so far—they must individually figure out what inspires them and follow that drive to create experiences and tools that are meaningful. He also spoke to the parents, all of whom were eager to understand how to support their students’ extra-curricular activities. The secret: just encourage them to keep going!

Jesse’s slides gives the kids a new mantra

After speeches by the ESA and the Grable Foundation and receiving certificates from the Smithsonian, the students’ games were featured at WQED’s family game day, an event in which Pittsburgh-area families learned about game design, how to play games together, and the STEM Challenge. The event showcased local resources and the winners got to playtest their game with over 250 people!

Congratulations to the winners of the National STEM Challenge Video Game Competition!

This audience was invaluable to them. One explained, “I kept trying to get friends to play my game, but they just want to be nice. Getting to see how my game impacts real kids helped me figure out what I want to do next and how to actually sell it!” Another local student, already creating his own games, relished the chance to meet kids who were farther along the game design pathway. He commented, “This event helped me see what I need to do next. I know what tools to check out, how to get my game out there, and how to find a community that will support me.”

Congratulations to the winners of the National STEM Challenge Video Game Competition!

The weekend’s festivities soon ended, and the students exchanged contact info with their new friends and went home armed with game design tips and a new sense of how to use their passion towards a career. One parent thanked host E-Line Media by saying “You know, I never wanted my son to be an engineer, but now I think there might be nothing better!”

Students playtesting at WQED Game Day

By validating their pathways, we hope the event made a difference to those who attended and those who observed. Over the summer, we will offer more interviews with the winners and those who attended WQED’s game day. We hope to bring their lessons to you!

Earlier this year, Sandhya Nankani, founder of Literary Safari, wrote a blog post for our site about the need for more diversity in kids’ apps. As often happens when an important idea bubbles to the surface, a movement has been born. Sandhya tells us the blog post sparked a great deal of conversation, and an interdisciplinary group of producers, publishers, educators, and academics has just launched a new initiative called “Diversity in Apps” that not only aims to address the need for more diverse content in mobile media but will also highlight the work of companies that are publishing diverse content.

They’re looking for broad support and participation. In the coming days, they aim to announce upcoming events, including Google Hangouts, so visit the the diversityinapps.com website for more information about the initiative, its founding members, and to sign up for updates or to let the team know how you’d like to participate!

Today, young children have access to more technology than ever, and families of almost all socio-economic backgrounds are making smartphones and other Internet-enabled devices part of their daily lives. Many early education programs around the country are beginning to determine how they might harness these tools to engage with parents, improve home-to-school connections, and otherwise augment efforts to help children develop early language and literacy skills.

Last week, New America and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop launched an interactive map showing where these programs are located, how they are going about their work, and what evidence of impact they are able to share.  We presented the map (see image below), which is still “in beta,” at CGI America, an annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, in Denver last week. The map provides a bird’s eye view of innovation around the country, and is designed to enable users to sort initiatives by type of program, technological tool, evidence of impact, age of children served, and more. Clicking on the pindrops for each program opens a new page with a profile of the program including narratives, submitted by the programs, on how they got started and why.

We have named this mapping project InTEL: Integrating Technology in Early Literacy, and are already hearing positive feedback from state and program leaders who have been testing new approaches and need to be able to see the landscape and find examples with a solid research base.  We encourage you to click around and take a look as we improve the map and profiles over the summer and let us know what you think. This data collection, which started with a survey in February, has now been re-opened and our teams will be adding information to the map on a rolling basis through the end of September.  If you represent a program that you think should be included in our database, please complete our survey.

Please note: This map does not attempt to categorize products, such as websites, curated collections, subscription-based online libraries, apps, or e-books. We are focusing instead on interventions, pilot initiatives, programs and other activities pursued by educators and community leaders.

The beta version is supported by The Alliance for Early Success, a catalyst for bringing state, national, and funding partners together to improve state policies for children, starting at birth and continuing through age eight, and by the Pritzker Children’s Initiative. The project was born in an early childhood working group meeting at CGI America in 2014, was announced during presentations at the White House event on “Bridging the Word Gap,” and was highlighted as an upcoming project at the White House Summit on Early Learning last year.

The InTEL map is a part of a larger data platform called Atlas, which is being developed by New America’s Education Program. It will house different data visualizations, maps, and other interactive displays of our research and policy analysis. A beta version of the platform was published in June 2015.

Stay tuned for more information about an official release of the InTEL map and an overview of its findings this fall.

Several years ago, Museum of the Moving Image presented an exhibition called Spacewar! Video Games Blast Off. This was nothing new for us. We had done exhibitions about video games, featuring playable games in the Museum’s galleries, many times before–we presented our first such exhibition, Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade, a year after we opened in 1989–and video games have been featured in our core exhibition for nearly a decade. But Spacewar was notable, in part, for commemorating the 50th anniversary of what is often called the first video game.

Photo by Siobhan Cavanagh

For the Museum’s Education department, the exhibition became an occasion to take stock and rethink how we teach with and about video games with students, teens, teachers, parents, and grandparents. As educators, we often work under the assumption that kids are interested in games, but adults are skeptical of them. But now that video games have passed their 50th birthday, maybe it’s time to rethink that assumption. After all, teachers, parents, and increasingly grandparents, have grown up with video games, just as today’s young people have. With that in mind, maybe the Museum space can activate a shared interest and appreciation: by looking at games historically and taking the form seriously, our programs can bring young people and adults together through games.

When E-Line Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center contacted us on behalf of AARP and Mentor Up as a potential host for an intergenerational game design workshop for young people (ages 10+) and the older adults (ages 50+) in their lives, we jumped at the opportunity. This was an extension of the work we were already doing, and we were eager to see what an intergenerational game design workshop might look like at the Museum. We offered just one non-negotiable: the Museum had to be more than just a venue. Since we have some of the most significant games from the 1970s and 1980s on exhibit in the galleries, we wanted to incorporate the playing of historic games into the workshop design. Doing so seemed like a natural way of bringing multiple generations of game players together while also underscoring a key idea we wanted the participants to walk away with–that the principles we would ask them to think about in the workshop related to systems and design thinking are fundamental to how games work, whether the reference point is Ms. Pac-Man or Minecraft.

As we finalized the details of the workshop, we began our outreach efforts. Having never done an intergenerational program quite like this before, we decided to activate all of the networks we thought might have some interest, including teachers and administrators at our partner schools, colleague organizations who also do work with youth and digital media, the Museum’s family-level members, alumni from our Summer Media Camp game design programs, and, of course, the general public via the Museum’s printed marketing materials, website, and social media platforms. We were delighted to find that the workshop filled up almost immediately, with a huge level of excitement expressed from the registrants. We quickly switched over to a waitlist to deal with the overwhelming interest. As we prepared for the workshop, we also began studying the enrollment patterns: While the program was open to to youth ages 10-18, we only had participants in the 10-12 age range; additionally, about half of the older adults were parents rather than grandparents.

Photo by Jordan Smith

Last Sunday, we had a capacity crowd turn up for the workshop. The facilitators from E-Line and the Cooney Center had a clear vision for how the three hours would unfold. After an ice breaker, participants were introduced to some basic trends in game design, which challenged assumptions about who plays games, who makes them, and why. Then the conversation moved into game design terminology, and games as playful systems. Exploring games as systems was a crucial first step, both in starting to identify the similarities between some of the games the older adults mentioned liking (Scrabble, Othello, cards) and the games the young people called out (Pokemon, Minecraft, Super Smash Brothers) as well as transitioning into the actual game design activity. Pairs teamed up into small groups. Some went into the galleries to play and think about historic games, and the rest were each given a grab bag of random objects such as pipe cleaners, stickers, and even a few pieces of candy to make an analog game, then try out the other games. This experience introduced the concept of playtesting—an important step for any designer, and an opportunity to learn from the group. After a round, the groups switched between the galleries and the analog design activities. When everyone had visited the Museum and made an analog game, they transitioned into digital game-making using Gamestar Mechanic.

As is often the case with these sorts of workshops, the primary complaint from participants was that there just wasn’t enough time. Participants left with the log-in and account info they needed to keep working on their games on their own, though, and they were clearly brimming with ideas about what they wanted to do next. We were particularly inspired by a grandmother-grandson pair. The grandmother was visiting from Oregon, and on the way out of the workshop, she enthusiastically mentioned that she would be setting up her own log-in so that she and her grandson could continue what they’d started at the Museum—her from the West Coast, him in New York.

Such success stories point the way towards future programming exploring the intergenerational appeal of game design. Our collaboration with E-Line Media, the Cooney Center, and Mentor Up also introduced us to another organization offering programs in this space that takes a pedagogical approach similar to our own. As this community of organizations and instructors continues to grow, we are excited to engage in further dialogue with Mentor Up and other like-minded colleagues to develop, refine, and share best practices for game design programming for wide-ranging and diverse audiences.

Jordan Smith is Manager of Education Programs at Museum of the Moving Image, where she oversees the Museum’s informal learning programs including after-school and summer classes, family programs, teen programs, and partnerships. She holds a BA in Education from Smith College and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University. Her favorite game is Yahtzee.

Chris Wisniewski is Deputy Director for Education & Visitor Experience at Museum of the Moving Image, where he manages all of the Museum’s educational programs for students, teachers, children, teens, families, adults, and seniors, as well as its online educational activities. He also oversees the Museum’s internship and volunteer programs, as well as admissions and ticketing. He holds a BA in Social Studies from Harvard University and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University. His favorite game is Backgammon.