Tag Archives: game design

A long-distance runner, 13-year-old Lance Dugars knows how to go the distance. This very drive to cross the finish line helped him create The Brink Walker, the winning Middle School Gamestar Mechanic entry in the National STEM Video Game Challenge. Lance, from Katy, TX is an avid Gamestar Mechanic user who has been interested in video games “for as long as I can remember.” When he started creating his own games, Lance started experimenting with tools that would let him…

Like most 13 year old boys, Cole Nutgeren has diverse hobbies and interests, like playing the piano and fencing. But unlike many kids his age, he takes a systems thinking approach to everything he does and likes to think about the building blocks that make these systems run. It is this approach that helped him design the Best Middle School Scratch game for the 2015 National STEM Video Game Challenge award. Cole was immediately hooked on Scratch when a friend…

Olivia Thomas, 17, is a 21st century learner. We got to spend some time with this self-directed and self-motivated creative thinker at the National STEM Video Game Challenge winners weekend in Pittsburgh, and were impressed by her drive to chase the opportunities she wants and the generous spirit that pays those opportunities back to younger students. When we asked Olivia how she started designing games, she recalled a rainy day car ride with her dad: “I want to make a…

The 11th annual Games+Learning+Society Conference brought together game designers, educators, researchers, funders, academics, cultural institutions, and everyone in between (…and yes… there are even more individuals interested in learning games). This diverse collective sparked debate around issues facing games and learning and the future of this growing field, and, fittingly, this was the first year games were turned away from the showcase. This year’s conference marked a key shift in its history—no longer was the event focused on the need…

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…

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…

The entries are in for the National STEM Video Game Challenge, and our expert judges have been busy playing video games! This year we’ve received more than 4,000 entries in the following categories: Gamestar Mechanic, Gamemaker, Scratch, Unity, Open Platforms, and Written Design Documents. The STEM Challenge has hosted more than 35 game design workshops across the country for youth and educators. The energy at these workshops was amazing—read more about a youth workshop that took place at the Science…

In an education setting, video games are often dismissed as mindless entertainment. This was the opposite in the National STEM Video Game Challenge Workshop hosted at the Science Museum of Virginia (SMV), where Barrie Adleberg and I helped students to critically think about the mechanics of a video game and apply them to their own passions. Students from all over Richmond filed into one of the Museum’s classrooms; they were clearly excited to find out what a video game design…

Together with our partners at the Smithsonian and E-Line Media, we are thrilled to announce that the National STEM Video Game Challenge is now open for its fourth year! The Challenge aims to motivate interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning among youth by tapping into their natural passions for playing and making video games. The competition is held in partnership with founding sponsor the Entertainment Software Association and the generous support of the Institute of Museum and…

He called himself MechaStayPuft. That was the username and avatar he would use across all of the game design platforms we used. It struck me as an odd choice for a teenager, a compound reference to Ghostbusters, which turned 30 this past June, and Gozilla vs. MechaGodzilla, which predates Ghostbusters by a decade. How did a student who couldn’t have been born before the Clinton administration be acquainted with two relics of 70s and 80s counterculture? Regrettably, I never found…