Middle school students lit up the Philadelphia skyline Friday night with video games they designed themselves as part of Philly Tech Week and the America 250 celebration.<\/p>\n
Drexel University transformed the Cira Centre into what organizers called the world’s largest playable video game display, projecting student-created games onto the building’s 29-story LED wall overlooking Schuylkill Yards in University City.<\/p>\n
The games were developed through the Skyscraper Games project, organized by the nonprofit Young Futures. Students learned coding and game design while creating games for a virtual model of the Cira Centre.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s going to be really fun to see how the game I made in a studio would be projected up there,” student designer Jake Lee said.<\/p>\n
For many students, the project offered their first experience with coding.<\/p>\n
“It was confusing, all the coding and stuff,” student designer Jessie Lee said. “It was my first time getting used to it.”<\/p>\n
Drexel University’s Entrepreneurial Game Studio helped transform the students’ creations into fully playable games displayed across the skyscraper-sized screen.<\/p>\n
“We get to take the creativity of these wonderful young people and put them up on a gigantic canvas,” said Erin Truesdell, an assistant professor of informatics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “Today’s really a culmination and a celebration of that. We’ve got four wonderful student games that we’ll be showing tonight, in addition to, of course, the classic skyscraper Tetris.”<\/p>\n
Dozens of people gathered in Drexel Square to watch and play the games, including several members of Philadelphia City Council.<\/p>\n
Frank Lee, a Drexel University professor of digital media known for creating the original skyscraper-sized Tetris display more than a decade ago, said the project is designed to inspire students to pursue careers in technology and computing.<\/p>\n
“This is part motivation for them to become excited to then pursue, hopefully, a computing-related field in college, as well as then move on and go on to a computing field as part of their work,” Lee said.<\/p>\n
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