By Jordan Shapiro, Contributor
Young video game designers will be included in the 3rd White House Science Fair to be held on Monday, April 22nd. This is the second time that winners of the STEM Video Game Challenge have been invited to the Science Fair. Now in its third year, the National STEM Video Game Challenge is a competition among middle school and high school kids who design their own video games. Presented by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at the Sesame Workshop and E-Line Media along with partners like the AMD foundation, Microsoft’s XBOX 360, and the Entertainment Software Foundation, the STEM challenge “aims to motivate interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by tapping into students’ enthusiasm for playing and making video games.” There’s still time for young people to enter this year’s STEM challenge before the April 24th deadline. Perhaps your kid could be honored at next year’s White House Science Fair. President Obama hosted the first White House Science Fair in late 2010. The fair is part of his Educate to Innovate campaign, which aims to encourage excellence in math and science. As the President said at the first Science Fair, “If you win the NCAA championship, you come to the White House. Well, if you’re a young person and you produce the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too.” Geeks, gamers, and developers should all be thrilled by Obama’s recognition of young game designers. It is further evidence that the video game stigma is waning. Gamification is already a hot buzzword in business management and product development. Game-based learning is quickly becoming a regular supplement to our education strategies. Including STEM Challenge winners as part of the White House Science Fair shows that developers are getting the kind of recognition they deserve. Although the common view is that video games are simply entertainment–an escape from the real world, I think video games function as interactive mythology. They can be understood as non-linear stories that help individuals derive meaning from the complicated paradoxes of everyday life. Obama’s decision to acknowledge excellence among young game designers celebrates the exceptional multidisciplinary thinking that’s involved in making interactive stories. Hopefully, this is another indication that we are moving away from the misguided divisions that permeate our education system. We can only hope that we inch toward a more holistic integrated concept of “knowledge.” Our current system creates rigid separations between the ways the sciences and the humanities define truth. Video games (in particular, the design and creation of games) have the potential create a world of adults who are practiced at using the deterministic technologies of scientific thinking to interact with the fuzzy ambivalent metaphors of the humanities. The White House Science Fair will take place on April 22nd around 2pm ET and will be webcast live at http://www.whitehouse.gov/live Jordan Shapiro is author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide to Maximum Euphoric Bliss and co-editor of Occupy Psyche: Jungian and Archetypal Perspectives on a Movement. For information
