The Red and Black

Issue date: 7/17/09 Section: Variety

Media Credit: CHARLES-RYAN BARBER Youngsters at Athens' GameCamp! learn to design video games in a social atmosphere.

For many American children, summertime means summer camp. For those youths who do not necessarily find great joy in the traditional summer camps, there is a new one coming to Athens, and it is coming by way of computer technology - GameCamp!.

According to its Web site, GameCamp! is a summer camp in which middle and high schoolers are taught how to create and design video games. In addition to this educational aspect, GameCamp! aims to raise a minimum of $3000 to offer scholarships to and buy equipment for underprivileged adolescents.

"We're trying to give, I guess you would say, some legitimacy, to the art of making video games," said Lucas Jensen, an active member of the newly established local sector of GameCamp!.

Jensen, an avid gaming fan himself, points out the gap this camp fills for kids who don't exactly fit in with the stereotypical idea of summer camps.

"If someone said, 'Hey, do you want to go to weight lifting camp or video game camp,' I think a lot of kids would take video game camp, but they have never had anything like that before," he said.

While the idea of replacing physical recreation with video games may seem unsettling to some, Jensen has a quick response to this concern

"[Parents] see their kids sitting around playing video games all the time, and sometimes they see that as an anti-social activity or not educational," he said.

But Jensen wants the public to know that GameCamp!™ aims to curb those beliefs about video games.

"There's math and science here, there's critical thinking skills, there's puzzle solving and other things like that."

During the program kids will design video games, but not necessarily in the way they might imagine.

"Over the course of the camp the kids are going to team up with some experts and design a game based on some sort of social issue," said Jensen

"[GameCamp!] is not just going to say 'design a game were you shoot Zombies.' Everybody would know what that game would look like."

Jensen draws comparisons to the types of games the kids may create to the popular game franchise SimCity.

"That's a game where you lay down pipes for plumbing systems for cities," he said.

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