It is always great when you have motivated students and this year seems to bring me more than the last few years. My sophomore class, with a few juniors, are the driving force behind a new after-school game development program to learn new pieces of software. I am hesitant to call it a club because of the extra paperwork and stuff that goes along with the formation of a club at our school. I have essentially made it an enhancement of my existing office hours, which I now call “Studio Time.” Any student, in any program area or club at our school, is welcome to come and work on technology-related projects. Students that need assistance in my class or any other class are welcome to come in for help.

The students forming the program have named it C-Dev Studios after the name of our building. The goals of C-Dev Studios is to give students additional time to work on class projects, work on projects for competitions, contests, and scholarships, and to have a mini-lecture series on new software concepts or on general game design. The students are creating a list of topics that they would like me to cover as part of the mini-lecture series and several students are already starting to teach their peers about what they know.

As for long range goals that I would like to see with C-Dev Studios are the following:

• Guest speakers to help with the mini-lectures (either in person or via Skype)
• Summer camp for existing students to continue to work on projects over the summer
• Summer camp for future 8th graders to help our school recruit students