Video-game programming

rew Mathisen has heard tales of the glass ceiling, the term used to describe the barriers women may face in rising up the corporate ladder.

Now the 15-year-old Broomfield, Colo., resident can do something about it — or at least electronically simulate shattering the divide.

The ninth-grader created a video game over the summer in which a woman scurries through a corporate office and, if she avoids morale-draining male co-workers, gets the promotion.

Drew learned to create the game at a unique camp held last month at the University of Denver. While some students spent their summer at the park or playing with pals, she hunkered down to study the science behind game programming.

Dubbed Pixels, Programming, Pedagogy and Play, the program helped both teachers and students learn more about what makes video games tick. The program, in addition to the university’s existing video-game curriculum, explored the science and math underpinnings of modern gaming.

“I’ve never done any programming until now,” Drew says. “It’s all problem solving to get it all to work.”

The students, ages 14 and 15, spent two weeks designing their own video games. The lessons illustrated that gamers need to take several years of math and computer science classes before they can realize their dream jobs.

Students at the Monroe Technology Center in Loudoun County study science to learn animation, a similar skill set used by those creating today’s video games.

Those lessons also can be taught at the university level; Virginia Tech is gearing up for a spring 2008 course in video-game programming.

At American University, some communication students are taught video-game programming to create education contests.

Scott T. Leutenegger, professor and game-development program director at the University of Denver, says his colleagues use video games as a platform for raising awareness on social issues and improving medical techniques in addition to teaching students about science.

“The latter has the most powerful effect at the high school level,” Mr. Leutenegger says, adding that the number of students going into technologically based majors is dropping.

In the summer course, the boys poured their energy into creating action-packed games, while the girls offered a far different slate of games. One girl crafted a contest featuring a ballerina who keeps dancing as long as the gamer keeps hitting the right keys. For that contest, the student drew several images of a ballerina and animated them, a process Mr. Leutenegger compared to fashioning a flip-book cartoon.

“She got excited about getting realistic ballet movements into her characters,” he says.

The subject matter ultimately didn’t matter, at least from a programming point of view. Students had to appreciate the science behind the characters and gaming elements in question.

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