More than 85 students from Black colleges across the South and east coast descended on Spelman College this weekend for the school’s fourth-annual HBCU Game Jam. Over the three-day event, students attended workshops on game design and development, culminating in a hack-a-thon where student teams spent 24-hours building their own video game.
For the first time this year, the Game Jam was hosted in the Arthur M. Blank Innovation Lab in Spelman’s new Mary Schmidt Campbell Center for Innovation & the Arts, where participants have access to all the tech resources needed to create a new game from coding and story-boarding to product development and design.
After the hack-a-thon, the students presented their games to a panel of judges, who distributed $10,000 in prize money to the top three games.
A team from Howard University won first place for their game Famished. Students from Alabama A&M, Clark Atlanta University, and Spelman College got second place for their game Erika & Me, and a team from Spelman got third place with a game called Lost Souls.
Every year, the Game Jam is organized by students and run with the help of the innovation lab’s staff. This year the event was co-chaired by Trinity Royal, a senior computer science major, and Devyn Washington, a senior game design and development major.
“We both have a passion for the Game Jam. Even without the monetary value, there’s a personal connection because we didn’t know each other before. So it’s because of the Game Jam I met my forever friend,” Royal said.
Throughout their time participating in Game Jam, Washington and Royal said they’ve sharpened more than just their technical skills like coding and game design, they’ve also learned about project management and public speaking.
“From the competition and planning aspect, we learned resource management, negotiation skills, and project management,” Washington said.
Over the past four years Washington and Royal have seen the Game Jam grow and are proud to have been able to expand to schools outside of Atlanta and Washington such as Dillard University in Louisiana and Philander Smith University in Arkansas, which participated for the first time this year.
“I went from not placing at all freshman year, to coming in second place with Devyn and winning two other categories, to now being the president. It’s basically a full-circle moment,” Royal said.
Jaycee Holmes, director of Spelman’s Arthur M. Blank Innovation Lab and the professor that introduced Washington and Royal during the second Game Jam, wants to nurture the next generations of Black techies to enter the industry.
“I used to be a product manager [at Microsoft], so that meant I would work with designers and engineers, and we were deciding what features would go into technologies that were used by millions of people,” she said.
The Spelman alum hopes the knowledge and experience students gain in the Game Jam and at the innovation lab year-round will show them the kind of impact they can have in a tech career.
While Georgia is branding itself as the “Tech Capital of the South,” Black professionals make up only 5% of the tech workforce nationwide, according to the Kapor Center, a venture capital firm focused on the intersection of racial justice and technology.
As the Innovation Lab’s assistant director, Eric Thompson thinks the Game Jam can be a critical first step in pushing more Black students to see careers in tech as a viable option.
“I think it’s important for Black people to be making stuff and building things because we have so much to offer and such a unique perspective,” he said. “The stuff that the students come up with in here is incredible. When the facilities and resources are made available, we see the amazing things that can happen.”
Thompson said he hopes the students who compete in the hack-a-thon get to experience the fulfillment of finishing a project and the confidence boost that comes along with it.
“When I was in engineering school, I remember having really hard projects and impossible deadlines, but when I got it done, that confidence really gave me the ability to know I can build anything if I put my mind to it,” he said.
Oak Hampton, a junior mass media arts major at Clark Atlanta University, found that boost at the innovation lab and was one of the first non-Spelman students on the Game Jam’s organizing committee.
She said participating in the hack-a-thon helped her recognize how her skills as an artist could translate into a career in tech.
“I want to work in the gaming industry, and it helped me realize that I don’t have to know how to code because I can work on developing the narrative and creating character concept art,” Hampton said.
Helping to translate their passions into practical experience is central to what Holmes sees as the purpose of the innovation lab. In addition to the prize money, the students are also getting the opportunity to present their work to the Game Jam’s sponsors like Unity, Microsoft, Ghost Gaming, and Zynga.
“Our classes here at Spelman help give students an amazing foundation for the disciplines that they want to enter. What the innovation lab is doing — and what I think my time in tech helped me understand — is that we need to compliment that theoretical knowledge that they’re learning in the classrooms with skill based or project based experiences,” Holmes said.
She has students working on research projects for app development, network devices, artificial intelligence ,and mixed-reality programs that are all getting hands-on experience in the fields they hope to find jobs in.
“They’re getting a tangible understanding of what they’re learning in their various classes and they can take that knowledge and apply it to projects that can actually go on their resume,” Holmes said.
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