Summer camp uses video game design to interest students in STEM careers
Longwood’s ITTIP hosted Digispiredii, a summer academy focusing on video game design.
Tearing themselves away from a video game to do homework is a daily battle for some teenagers – but not for a group of high-school students studying at Longwood last summer. That’s because their homework was a video game.
Sixty-nine high-school students learned video game design in a two-week National Science Foundation-funded project coordinated by Longwood’s Institute for Teaching through Technology and Innovative Practices (ITTIP).
Digispired ii Summer Academy, part of Digispired ii: Workforce Investigation Inspiration for STEM project, was held July 12-23, 2010, at Longwood, Virginia State University and the Southern Virginia Higher Education Center in South Boston. This was the first year of a three-year effort that continues an earlier three-year, NSF-funded project also called Digispired.
The Digispired project, which consists of a two-week summer program and activities throughout the school year, seeks to interest students in careers in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM).
“The grant is not just about game design; it’s about motivating these students to explore and understand STEM-related fields and careers,” said Dr. Manorama “Mano” Talaiver, ITTIP director and the principal investigator of Digispired. Participating students interact with professional game design experts, meet with graduate engineering students who provide hands-on instruction on sensors in game controllers, visit the Science Museum of Virginia and learn the programming language C#, which is necessary to create advanced games.
The ITTIP, which serves primarily 25 public school divisions and is headquartered in South Boston, is an outreach of Longwood that researches and develops effective technology-related instructional strategies and models.
