School may be out for summer but you’d never know it around the Wlid Pockets offices.  Summer vacation brings summer camps and Wild Pockets has been heavily involved in a handful of themaround the country and most heavily involved in the two Pittsburgh camps that are only a mile or so from our office.  The Tchno Teens camp recently ended and it was a wonderful experience that we are very proud of.

Late last year we partnered with the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh and Catalyst Connection to develop a game design curriculum for their Techno Teens Program (formerly called Pittsburgh DigiPen Game Development Camp.)  Techno Teens is a video game development camp that was designed to reach at-risk youth and expose them to technology, math and science concepts using a hands-on approach while improving the typical student/teacher ratio.  Not only do the students learn how to make a video game, they learned about teamwork, time management and giving presentations while also hearing from people working in the local technology industry and touring various companies and schools.

This is the 6th year that the Urban League and Catalyst Connection have offered the program but this year they wanted to take this program several steps farther.   They wanted to not only extend the summer camp to 3 weeks but turn the entire program into a year-long imitative and offer a variety of workshops, speakers and field trips throughout the rest of the year.  We have been very excited about this program and on July 6th, all of our hard work was put to the test as 40+ students were accepted into the Techno Teens Program and jumped right in with very little, if any, programming or game development experience.

I checked in on the camp every few days but tried to avoid ruining the surprise of their final game presentation.  On, Friday, July 16th, I attended the final presentations and was astonished by the quality of the games and presentations the students delivered!

You can play (and rate) all of the games at http://technoteens.weebly.com.

The teams won various prizes (best art, best character, best story, best presentation) and opened the games up for an hour before the presentations so the public could help determine the best game.  Gummy Land won Best Game (and the students took home new digital cameras!)