When students design an award winning video game, they know that they can use their love of technology to teach others and to bring honor to themselves and their school.
“You can go to any school really in East Tennessee, and the first thing you notice as soon as you walk through that door is that the only trophies you see are sports trophies,” said David Crockett High School student Austyn Shelton. He is a member of the team that won first place at the state competition for video game design. “And that makes kids think that they have to live up to that legacy and to become good at sports. That’s why most anyone who goes here is pretty much an athlete or something else.”
Shelton and his team mates Corbin Cowden and Sydney Hill took home the Technology Student Association award for “The Abstraction,” a video game which focuses on teaching kids life lessons. The prize was awarded at the state competition in Chattanooga. The game design took much time, even time outside their class with drafting teacher Guy McAmis
“Some of (the skills TSA covers) I know how to do. Video game design is not one of them,” McAmis said. “They basically learned this on their own. So they did it from scratch themselves.”
“There’s not really a class (for video game design),” Shelton added. “The game that we made and the stuff that we had to do, we had to go learn how to do it on our own. There’s really no one here for that.”
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