Inside CMU’s National High School Game Academy

Each summer, Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) is taken over by high schoolers from all over the world. These enthusiastic and energetic students — mostly rising juniors and seniors — come to Pittsburgh for one reason: to learn to make video games at CMU’s National High School Game Academy (NHSGA), a unique pre-college program with a game development focus that’s hosted at the ETC.

The program was founded in 2005 at the request of ETC co-founder Don Marinelli. Marinelli tapped Chris Klug, ETC Professor and still the current NHSGA director, to lead the program. That first summer, there were just eight students. Today, it’s one of the most selective and well-known pre-college gaming programs in the country and for good reason; each year, they get over 200 applicants, only accepting 30% of them.

But for Klug, now twenty years in, it’s never been about making games.

“I don’t think of it as a game camp,” said Klug. “I think of it as a way to bring like-minded people together.”

A Crash Course, For Everyone Involved

The six-week program begins with a two-week crash course in programming, sound design, storytelling, and art. For the pre-college students, it’s an introduction to everything they need to know to make games. For NHSGA’s teaching assistants (TAs), it’s a crash course in pedagogy.

Unlike traditional university TA roles, NHSGA’s teaching assistants have a role that goes beyond simply supporting ETC faculty. Instead, they collaborate with them closely. “We design the curriculum,” said Declan Scott, a NHSGA alum and University of Maryland undergraduate working as a TA this summer. “We give most of the lectures to the students and make all the homework assignments. It’s less of a teaching assistant role, more just actually teaching,” he said.

Once the initial two weeks of instruction end, the pre-college program moves from main campus to the ETC. There, the students are placed on six-person teams where they have four weeks to build two games. For their first “Lightning Round” assignment, they have only a week to create their own take on a classic arcade game; once they get a hang of the process, they spend the last three weeks of the program building an original game to present to faculty, friends, and family at the end of the six weeks.

For the TAs, the move to the ETC also switches their focus from teaching to mentoring; each TA is assigned to a few students to help them through the development process, and all of them are on-call to help teams solve any problems that arise.

“I hesitate to say I’m a TA, because it’s so much more than that here,” said Amy Chen, a rising sophomore in CMU’s School of Computer Science and another NHSGA alum turned TA. “Normal TAs might just grade or hold office hours. But here, you’re really integrated into the student experience.”

Chen came to NHSGA as a high schooler with no programming experience, applying for the program’s art track. But once she got here, she was surprised to learn that she enjoyed the technical side of things. She ended up producing her team’s final project, Pizza Apocalypse, which she describes as a “crazy” game where players deliver pizzas in, yes, the middle of a zombie apocalypse. After the program ended, they made it free to download on the App Store.

For Chen, returning as a TA in the program that introduced her to computer science was a way to give back. “I really like the hands-on curriculum building, but I also really like mentoring students because I can see myself in them,” she said. “I wanted to support beginner programmers, because that’s where I started.”

“A Mini College Experience”

Kate Drozhin, a student in this summer’s NHGSA cohort, is one of those beginning programmers. She discovered the program after reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin’s novel about two friends working as game developers. “It sparked my curiosity, and I became very curious about programming and video game design,” Drozhin said. She started looking for opportunities where she could learn to design games, stumbling on the NHSGA website in the process. After watching Pizza Apocalypse’s final presentation online, she knew where she wanted to go. “Seeing a group of people — students my age — work together and use creativity to make something new captivated me,” she said. “I was enamored.”

Even though Drozhin applied without a specific focus, she quickly decided to dedicate herself to learning programming. “NHSGA pushed me out of my comfort zone,” she said. “It was intense at first, but I got accustomed to the workload within the first two to three days.”

Her work during the first part of the summer paid dividends when she started working in a team during the second half. “I’ve never had an opportunity to work with so many outstanding, driven people in one place, where everyone was excited to learn. It’s been a wonderful experience,” she said. “My passion for programming has grown considerably, and working on these complicated creative projects taught me to communicate better, synthesize ideas more clearly, and focus on what's important.”

“This summer felt like a mini college experience,” said Drozhin. “You have to prioritize and choose what's important for you to do first, whether that’s the next day's work or just talking with interesting and amazing people.”

Drozhin isn’t alone in her experience. For many NHSGA alums, the summer they spent at the program still stands out years later. For 2023 CMU School of Computer Science graduate and current SpaceX Software Engineer Gilbert Fan, NHSGA taught him the meaning of collaboration — a spirit he’s brought to everything he’s done since.

That summer, Fan ended up as producer on a Lightning Round team that — due to an odd number of students — was one person short. “We all locked in for that entire week, got meals together, had long work sessions… and we made a fun, complete game on time. It really felt like we had succeeded against the odds, ” he said. “ “It was one of the first times I really had to think about my time, evaluate what I could get done, and risk not meeting a deadline.”

For Fan, this was the first time he had considered what it meant to work with other people. “A lot of the "teamwork" things I had experienced before were really just individual competitions,” Fan said. “If you didn't perform, you wouldn't really affect anyone else too much. NHSGA let me see what worked and what didn't. It was very influential to my core values.”

“That lightning round team is still one of the examples I think of when thinking about a healthy, productive team. I'm always trying to emulate that when I get the chance to be a leader,” Fan said.

Lighting the Fire

Klug attributes the program’s continued success to what happens when students are given real responsibility and a sense of community. “You put five or six people together who all love games, and you give them a toolkit and a method of working … and you just light a fire and back up and let them go,” he said.

While there’s no formal pipeline from NHSGA into CMU’s undergraduate programs — or to the ETC itself — many students do go on to attend CMU as undergraduates or even become ETC graduate students.

For those that do, they point to their summer here as the moment when they realized they were drawn to the kind of collaborative, interdisciplinary work CMU is known for. “This fall, a former NHSGA student is beginning her studies at the ETC. She fell in love with our culture when she did the program, and always wanted to return,” said Klug. “Now she’s back, and her younger sister did NHSGA this summer too.”

“In the immortal words of Randy Pausch, the program is really a big head fake,” Klug said.

The late CMU professor and ETC co-founder Randy Pausch coined the term in his Last Lecture, referring to the indirect learning we get from experience. “We actually don’t want our kids to learn football,” Pausch said. “Yeah, it’s really nice that I have a wonderful three-point stance … but we send our kids out to learn much more important things: teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance.”

For Klug, the program is another example of Pausch’s essential principle. Students come in thinking they’ll learn to make games, but what they take away from the experience is something entirely different. “It's not about how many lines of code you write,” Klug said. “It’s about learning to be generous with your teammates, and working with other people to make something bigger than yourself.”