The National STEM Video Game Challenge has motivated interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in nearly 20,000 middle and high school students since launching in 2011 by harnessing their natural passion for playing video games and inspiring them to design games of their own.

Presented by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and E-Line Media with founding sponsor the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the STEM Challenge has named 113 youth winners – including 40% female – from 25 states and 80 cities over the course of six competition cycles (see map below). Over $500,000 in prizes has been awarded to winners and supporting institutions, and seven winners showcased their games at a White House Science Fair. Additionally, hundreds of youth and mentor game design workshops were held nationally.

Geographic distribution of STEM Challenge winners

Winners of the 2017 National STEM Video Game Challenge were honored as part of a panel on The Youth-to-Industry Pipeline: How Challenges & Game Jams Create Career Pathways at the 2017 Games for Change Festival in New York City on July 31, 2017. The winning games were also on display in the Marketplace for attendees to play.

Michael Levine, Founding Executive Director, Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, announced the names of all 23 winners middle and high school winners of the 2017 competition cycle and premiered the Meet the 2017 National STEM Video Game Challenge Winners video. Winning games were identified in 14 categories including GameMaker, Gamestar Mechanic, Open Platform – Individual, Open Platform – Team, Scratch, Unity, Written Game Design Document, and Games for Change.

This year’s winners reflect an exceptionally talented group. Five of the winners – Lucas Armand, John Korhel, John Ripple, Shrey Pandya, and Connor Shugg – were previous STEM Challenge winners. Other winners have participated and won related competitions such as the Congressional App Challenge and the Verizon Innovative Learning app challenge.

For the first time in STEM Challenge history, one school – Milwaukee Montessori – yielded two winners in two different categories during the same competition cycle – Himani Chonkar for Written Game Design Document and Zoe Plunkett for Scratch Middle School, a fact made more impressive in that the same school produced a previous STEM Challenge winner in 2012.

Following the announcement of the winners, Olivia Thomas spoke about how her participation and win in the 2014-15 STEM Challenge led her to pursue a double major in computer science and GIMM (Games, Interactive Media, and Mobile Development) at Boise State University.

Next up was Sara Cornish, Senior Director, Programs & Strategy, Games for Change, who announced the winners of the 2017 National Games for Change Student Challenge and then introduced high school student Geneva Heyward to share her perspective. Not only was Geneva the Grand Prize Winner in the 2017 Games for Change Student Challenge, but she was also the winner of the 2017 STEM Challenge Unity category.

Michael Levine with Olivia and Geneva (photo courtesy of Games for Change)

Shifting the focus from students to organizations, Susanna Pollack, President, Games for Change, serving as a moderator opened the discussion and question-and-answer session about how game making competitions, hackathons, and game jams inspire youth to level up from players to developers; build 21st century skills like coding, computational thinking, and system design; and pursue college and industry pathways. Joining Susanna and me on the panel were Marc Lesser, Senior Director, Learning Design, Mouse; Ani Martinez, Community Manager, Remake Learning; and Kevin O’Hanlon, Director, Federal Government Affairs, ESA.

Youth-to-Industry Pipeline panelists (photo courtesy of Games for Change)

In the seven years since the STEM Challenge was first announced at the White House by President Obama as part of the “Educate to Innovate” initiative, we’re thrilled that many other opportunities in the larger ecosystem have emerged to inspire and motivate youth. Now that the sixth and final STEM Challenge competition has concluded, we hope that middle and high school students will consider entering one of the other competitions, such as the National Games for Change Students Challenge, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards (video game design category), and the Technovation Challenge.

The STEM Challenge is thankful for our many sponsors over the years, including AARP/Mentor Up, AMD Foundation, Bayer, Games for Change, the Grable Foundation, Hive Digital Learning Fund in The New York Community Trust, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Microsoft, National Geographic Society, and the Smithsonian.

We’re also appreciative of the efforts of all of our national outreach partners over the years. Partners have included the American Library Association, BELL, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, BrainPOP, #BUILTBYGIRLS, Corporation for Public Broadcasting/PBS KIDS Ready to Learn, Edmodo, Empow Studios, Girls Scouts of the USA, Global Kids, International Game Developers Association, Learning Games Network, Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network, Urban Tech, Vsauce, and Youth Digital.

A final shout-out to all the teachers, librarians, mentors, parents, workshop hosts, expert judges, and STEM Challenge friends who have partnered with us. Together we share a passion for building out STEM pathways and we are excited to see what the future holds for our emerging game makers.

Mark German is President, E-Line Education at E-Line Media. In addition to managing the STEM Challenge for the last three competition cycles, Mark oversees the educational services division offering learning pathways delivered through game-based programs that empower youth to understand and shape their world.

It is not often that I come across workshops specifically related to the intersection of the design of children’s media and the issues surrounding diverse representations of children, critical race theory, and inclusivity. When I saw the call for proposals to the Equity and Inclusivity workshop at the 2017 Interaction Design and Children conference, I looked forward to  attending and meeting like-minded people who care about, study, and create within this intersection.

Workshop participants discussing their past work in regards to equity and inclusivity.

The workshop, co-organized by Kiley Sobel (University of Washington), Dr. Julie A. Kientz (University of Washington), Dr. Carmen Gonzalez (University of Washington), Dr. Jason C. Yip (University of Washington), and Dr. Tamara Clegg (University of Maryland), was structured in a way that encouraged industry professionals, researchers, students, and designers to discuss current issues surrounding equity and inclusivity in
our own work in addition to techniques for communicating these strategies and best practices within our respective fields. It was also exciting to hear that the workshop had merged with the Interaction Design & Autistic Children workshop, as I haven’t been previously involved in many conversations related to ability, an important intersectional identity to consider in design.

J. Elizabeth Mills (University of Washington) and I were excited to submit a proposal on behalf of KIDMAP (Kids’ Inclusive and Diverse Media Action Project), a grassroots coalition of which we are a part that aims to support the design and evaluation of diverse and inclusive children’s media by promoting collaboration between media creators, producers, researchers, and parents, by guiding media product recommendations and contributing perspectives to the ongoing conversations about representation in media. We proposed to present on two of KIDMAP’s current Diverse and Inclusive Growth (DIG) projects, namely the DIG Toolkit and DIG Checklist.

The DIG Toolkit is structured as a roadmap to ensure that inclusivity is addressed at each stage of media development, including (1) hiring, (2) budget and timeline, (3) audience and device choices, (4) concept design, (5) character design and casting, (6) art production, (7) audio production, (8) user testing and focus groups, and (9) marketing and social media. The DIG Checklist, which was created with the support of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, outlines guidelines for evaluating characteristics of inclusive media for children. The Checklist goes through categorical elements including: Content, Art, Audio, Audience, Purpose, Functionality and Navigation, Instructions and Guides, and Creative Team.

KIDMAP’s DIG Checklist was designed as a guide and rubric for producing and evaluating high-quality children’s media that is inclusive, equitable, and accessible.

After short introductions, we broke into small groups to discuss our work on promoting equity and inclusivity. Though many of us had been having conversations in our own scholarly communities surrounding buzzwords such as equity, inclusivity, and intersectionality, I appreciated that workshop organizers took the time to define the differences between these terms to ensure that all of us were on the same page and felt included in the discussion. I made note of this act of defining terms prior to discussion as a best practice when discussing these topics with others both inside my learning community and beyond.

As discussed in co-organizer Kiley Sobel’s blog post about the workshop, the small groups were instructed to present various equity and inclusivity challenges from our own design and research projects. Our group, which included a mix of designers and researchers, focused first on the importance of asset-based approaches to research and design. Because a majority of us in the small group work with populations, such as children with autism, low-income Latino immigrant parents, and children of color, each member of our group found it of the utmost importance to approach our work in a way that does not promote deficit thinking and need-based approaches. This applied not only to our frame of thinking when creating research or design projects and our methods, but also in taking a critical stance on our own intersectional identities and the role that they play when interpreting and communicating our data.

We asked ourselves how it might be possible to operationalize intersectionality beyond theory and apply it to our work without a specific framework or methodology for doing so. Some suggested that storytelling might be an effective way of approaching design and research with different groups. We also discussed the challenge of being critical of how our work is actually impacting the communities that we study. Especially in academic research, our group found it critical to reflect on how our work gives back to the community in ways that are not recognized or incentivized. Some discussed family-based workshops that allow for participatory design, skill building, and increased resources.

The workshop organizers left us with imperative questions to consider even after the day was over. As I am early in my career, I feel that these questions will be very influential in my future research. I continue to ponder key questions posed by the organizers, and a few that may be helpful for those interested in the intersection of children’s media design and equity and inclusivity are:

• Why am I here? Though this question is broad, it reminds me to reflect on why I care about the issues that I do. What is the driving force that leads me to continue to do this work?
• Why did I choose research as opposed to activism? As a researcher, I found this question very interesting. I am led to wonder whether and in what ways research can be activism. In what ways am I an agent of change?
• What are my participants getting out of my work? As mentioned above, it is critical to reflect on how the communities that I work with, who are more than mere subjects, are actually benefiting from my work. Without such indicators, what hope do I have that my work is disrupting the cycle of systems that do not call for equity or inclusivity? What ethical questions do I have in terms of my methods?
• How does my own intersectional identity impact my work? How do different aspects of my identity and experience influence the ways in which I conceive of research ideas or design projects, the design of my methods, and the communication of my findings or products to those within and outside of my field?

This workshop was very transformative to my own thinking, and it would be valuable to have this meeting every year. Another valuable component was the collaborative structure of our day through collective note taking in Google Docs and Google Presentations, as well as the zine that the organizers compiled for us so that we can not only continue to reflect on the day but share our discussion with others in a creative way.

Briana Ellerbe is currently a doctoral student at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her research interests include children’s media as a potential tool for education and social justice, racial representations in media, and community-engaged research. Prior to joining USC, Briana worked as Research Manager at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. There, she worked primarily on the Families and Media Project, doing research with families to highlight the innovative ways that they incorporate technology into their lives and learning arrangements, and helped to translate those findings for media producers and educators. She is currently involved with the Kids’ Inclusive & Diverse Media Action Project (KIDMAP), a coalition of media producers, researchers, and designers dedicated to the creation and evaluation of diverse children’s media. 

Kiley Sobel introduces the workshop at the start of the day.

The 2017 Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference took place at Stanford University in California this past June. The conference brought together an amazing community of researchers, designers, educators, and industry specialists who are interested in designing (primarily technology and new media experiences) for and with children. Before the conference began, various groups of people put on one-day IDC workshops focusing on topics spanning from joint media engagement to making to co-design.

My co-organizers Dr. Julie A. Kientz (University of Washington), Dr. Carmen Gonzalez (University of Washington), Dr. Tamara L. Clegg (University of Maryland), and former JGCC fellow Dr. Jason C. Yip (University of Washington) and I decided to host a pre-conference workshop called Equity & Inclusivity at IDC. Due to our aligning interests, we joined forces with the Interaction Design & Autistic Children workshop, organized by Dr. Chris Frauenberger along with Katharina Spiel and Julia Makhaeva.

Our goal for the workshop was to bring together a community of researchers and designers who could share how they already make or plan to make equity—promoting fairness by allocating more resources and opportunities to those who need it— and inclusivity— the inclusion and meaningful participation of people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized— foundational to their work with children and families. These issues—equity and inclusivity—complement each other as we can use equitable practices and approaches to promote inclusion in our designs and methods.

Some small groups held their discussions on the roof of the Center for Education Research at Stanford.

We succeeded in this right; our 19 workshop participants had extremely important, diverse, intersectional interests concerning equity and inclusivity. As passionate undergraduate and doctoral students, research scientists, lecturers, and professors, their work concentrated on, for example, co-designing with children of color, children with disabilities, and children from underserved communities; understanding and designing interactive and immersive technologies for children with disabilities and illnesses; helping children’s media creators develop representative content (e.g., around race and disability); and creating and promoting STEM and making opportunities for girls, young women of color, and children with disabilities.

Throughout the day, we reflected on how our approaches, designs, and methods may either be restricting or facilitating equitable access and participation of diverse children and their families. As our participants’ work was diverse in focus, we also collectively reflected on how children’s and families’ intersecting identities (i.e., gender, race, class, ability, etc.), structural inequality, and power dynamics can make our work more challenging.

In the morning, workshop participants got to know each other in small groups and discussed what they have already done in regard to equity and inclusivity in their work, including what has been successful and what has been challenging. After this discussion, based on the challenges we collectively identified, we all established particular areas that we as individuals and a research community still need to address; for example, adapting methods to our participants’ diverse needs and abilities, recruiting marginalized children and families, and infrastructural issues, like scalability or our ability to influence policy. The afternoon consisted of more small and large group discussions on how we might get closer to addressing these challenges.

Outcomes

Ultimately, we (1) opened up an underdeveloped dialogue about the complexity of confronting and attending to issues of equity and inclusivity in research and design and (2) began to articulate where and how we as a community could go further in confronting these challenges. We took steps toward being more equitable and inclusive in our research by being both reflective and reflexive about our positionality as people who work and design with marginalized children and families.

So while we tackled many issues related to methods (e.g., recruitment), designs (e.g., representation, accessibility), and theoretical approaches (e.g., using a feminist or intersectional lens), what was most exciting to me was how we in the workshop turned the mirror onto ourselves. While we may be committed to equity and inclusivity in our work, our research community itself also needs to be equitable and inclusive. We need to create more spaces for people to critically explore these types of complex questions. But more importantly, we need more opportunities to share with each other and provide valuable guidance and support.

One main takeaway from our group discussions was that our conferences and meetings need to be more diverse. Beyond participation, we also discussed ways in which we could hold ourselves accountable to each other and the families that we aim to serve. We must realize our own responsibility and privilege as researchers and designers. We need to make external commitments to our participants and give back to the community in ways that might not always benefit the research directly. We must advocate for and amplify each other’s voices. We need to be more critical of our ethical commitments, realizing that those of us with privilege must also be activists if we want to affect equity and inclusivity in our own community.

This workshop was just the first step in making even stronger commitments to equity and inclusivity in our work with marginalized children and families. Our next steps include generating a list of more concrete to-do’s for our research and design community, finding both communication and publishing channels to promote equitable, inclusive design work for children and families, and developing a FAQ for people who want to do better at being more equitable and inclusive in their work. Now we’re excited for what these next steps will bring!

For more information, check out our website and zine, which documents the workshop, including our notes throughout the day!

Kiley Sobel is a doctoral candidate and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is interested in inclusive design, child-computer interaction, and assistive technology. She has worked as a teacher’s assistant in various early childhood education classrooms and as a behavioral therapist for children with autism. Her primary research is in understanding how interactive technology might help increase opportunities for children with diverse abilities and needs to equally, actively, and meaningfully participate in the same setting. She is currently working on her dissertation to investigate the role of interactive technology during inclusive play, or play between children with and without disabilities.

Olivia Thomas was one of the winners of the National STEM Video Game Challenge (2015-16). Now studying computer science and games, interactive media, and mobile development at Boise State University, Olivia recently shared her experience with the STEM Challenge in the “Youth-to-Industry Pipeline: How Challenges and Game Jams Create Career Pathways” panel at the 2017 Games for Change Festival in New York City. 

Olivia shares her experience as a National STEM Video Game Challenge winner with Games for Change Festival attendees. (Photo credit: Games for Change)

When I was younger, I either wanted to be a video game designer or an entomologist. Then I grew into a healthy fear of insects, and the rest is history.

Actually, there was a bit more to it than that. My path since I settled on the idea of designing games has really been an incredible one and there have been so many people and organizations that have helped me along the way. I’m here today to talk about my journey as a developer, and the contest that started it all.

As a 9-year-old who wanted to design video games, I had no idea where to start. I checked out some books from the library about programming, but after I had read 50 pages and only learned how to write a “hello world” program, I lost interest. Then, one day when I was in middle school, my mom emailed me a link to something called the National STEM Video Game Challenge. Being a very competitive child, something in me was immediately sparked. Through the STEM Challenge, I also discovered a game design tool called Gamestar Mechanic that captured—and sustained—my interest.

Suddenly, I had a tool, and I had a goal: Win the STEM Challenge.

Olivia presenting her original design, Colorless, at the White House Science Fair in 2016.

My first games were wobbly attempts at design, but each one was a little better than the last. I entered one of those early games in the STEM Challenge and, though it didn’t win, it kindled something in me that wasn’t going away. The goal of winning drove me to improve my designs, but regardless of whether I would ever win, the STEM Challenge motivated me like nothing else to keep designing more (and better) games. In total I designed over 60 games using the Gamestar Mechanic platform.

Eventually, I won the Scholastic “What’s Your Story?” Contest with one of my designs. As a prize, I participated in Gamestar Mechanic’s game design class, where I learned important lessons about scaffolding and playtesting. I still had the STEM Challenge in my sights and entered it every year. Finally, in my junior year of high school, I actually won. Winning the STEM Challenge gave me so many priceless experiences and resources. A highlight for me was touring Schell Games in Pittsburgh. Then, also through the STEM Challenge, I received the incredible opportunity to show my winning game at the 2016 White House Science Fair.

As I came to know the joy of seeing my creations blossom under my fingers, I found that I had a desire to share this sensation with others. Thanks to one of the contests that I won, I received a grant to put on a six-week game design workshop for middle school girls. During the workshop, I was even able to include activities that I learned at the STEM Challenge award ceremony.

All of these experiences shaped and solidified my decision to go into game design in college. The STEM Challenge and other contests not only gave me confidence that I could actually do this as a career, but they connected me to resources that made that future possible. My high school game design wins also helped me obtain scholarships that made college possible.

The only thing about my decision to pursue computer science and game development that really made me nervous was hardcore coding. I had this idea in my head that while the game designing I had done was fun, but it wasn’t the “real” thing. Perhaps the greatest surprise I encountered when I started college was learning that developing games for real wasn’t all that different from what I’d been doing for half of my life. I still love it just as much.

Through each of these experiences, I’ve learned more about the design process, how to work on a deadline, and embraced the process of learning new skills. And while I hardly realized it along the way, I’ve been training to become a developer from the start. It all began with the National STEM Video Game Challenge.

Olivia Thomas has been designing video games since the age of nine. Now she is double majoring in computer science and GIMM (Games, Interactive Media, and Mobile Development) at Boise State University. She has won several awards for her games, including the National STEM Challenge, the NCWIT Aspirations Award, and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Most recently she was invited to the White House Science Fair. She is a strong believer in the transformative power of games and hopes to pursue a career making educational games.