MICHAEL GORDON: Project S.E.E.D., I’d say is amazing thing that teens could, like, just do during the summer or during whenever. Cause, like, me going into junior year, my junior year, this was a good step for me learning about game design and learning about these topics, because you need to know about these in order to get to college and go into the real world.
PHILIP EHRENBERG: This idea of games being play spaces where you can explore a number of different disciplines, I think is really exciting, and so to give youth the critical thinking skills they need in order to develop their own games and to pursue the sorts of questions or disciplines that interest them feels like one of the more meaningful outcomes of something like a game design curriculum. We spend so much effort in this sort of program showing youth that they can think critically about issues that are important to them through this lens so that ultimately they can go and make their own games or they can apply the sort of collaboration and communication skills that they learned and do another type of creative project or go into a lab and work as a STEM professional. But there’s something about the collaborative space and the way that you are thinking about a person’s experience and cooperating to develop that experience in really meaningful ways that I think game design does really well.
PATRICK JAGODA: So when we think about literacy, we’re oftentimes thinking about reading and writing skills, and those are really important. Or when we think about media literacy, it has to do with learning how to negotiate and use various media. But Eric Zimmerman has this concept of gaming literacy, and he argues that knowing how to play and design games is critical to living in the 21st century. Games teach us how to understand and change rules. They allow us to think about our relationship as individuals to larger economic and political systems. And they help us think about re-coding the world that we live in.