Summer Programming

Overview

The program will have three sections—staff training, general game design education, and team project development:

• Staff training will be two weeks of learning digital facilitation, project management techniques, and the values of the program. During staff training, you will participate in curriculum activities to test them, and then collectively make revisions to the curriculum. We will also focus on team comfort and cohesiveness before we go into the full program.

• The initial part of the program will focus on full-group basic game development education. Staff will educate youth on introductory creative writing, music creation, coding, and project management practices. Staff will also educate youth about the mainstream games industry and its racist, worker exploitative structures, as well as why it is important to combat them by creating collaborative, economically democratic studio structures. Specifically, creating structures that center racial justice, accountability within the group, collective leadership, and process over product. We will also do a community budgeting exercise with some of the grant money to facilitate collective leadership practices and ownership of the space.

• Then, for the majority of the summer, youth will be able to delve into their own projects in teams of 2-3. In these project teams, youth will have the opportunity to delve deeper into an aspect of game development and create a project that is centered in a certain social justice or under-represented theme in mainstream games (i.e. school to prison pipeline, gender dysphoria, racially-just futures). They will be closely mentored by one staff member. Youth will have the opportunity to present their work within and outside the program.

By the end of the summer, we hope to celebrate and get feedback on the youth’s and staff’s progress and experiences in the program. Not only will we have documented journeys of students’ exploration of game design and digital art, but also the groundwork for a structure of a studio that can both mentor youth and create a community that centers racial justice, anti-capitalism, and collective leadership and care.