By Philip Courtney, CEO, Urban Arts
Eight years ago, I made a decision that a lot of people in arts education thought was a mistake.
It was time for Urban Arts to grow up and decide where we would focus and where we could be really good. Urban Arts had spent years as a broad-based arts education organization, a little of everything, for as many kids as possible. In 2018, I decided to bet the whole institution on a single, almost contrarian idea: that the art and science of game design could be an engine for economic mobility. Not enrichment. Not exposure. A pathway to career-ready skills and to STEM and STEAM degrees for students who too often don’t imagine themselves within the industry.
That bet required conviction, a board willing to follow me into it, and a curriculum built from the ground up. And it required choosing the right platform to build on. Unity was the platform.
Why Unity?
We evaluated the available game engines against two requirements that usually pull in opposite directions: accessibility for a tenth grader writing their first lines of code, and rigor for a senior designing in 3D. We needed a platform that could meet a beginner where they are and still refuse to let an advanced student coast.
OpportUnity and CommUnity
Two years later, that choice stopped being a technical decision and became a transformative one. At the Unity for Humanity Summit, I met Jessica Lindl and Rachel Pohl. They cared about game design as a creative medium, but what made the partnership real was that they cared more about outcomes. They asked the questions I wish every funder asked: What are your students actually achieving? Where are they enrolling in college? What are they studying? What careers are they walking into?
That alignment — an obsession with student trajectory, not just student participation — became the foundation of everything that followed. We learned from Unity’s engineers and educators. We traded curriculum ideas. Philanthropic investment came too. But the capital was never the point. The shared belief was.
In 2021, we launched Game On by Urban Arts our AP Computer Science Principles curriculum delivered entirely through a game-design lens — the only College Board-endorsed curriculum powered by Unity’s world-leading platform of tools. Students earn their AP CSP credit by building games. It’s hands-on, it’s project-based, and it is sticky with teenagers in a way a traditional CS course rarely is. One hundred percent of participating students ship a playable game. Our pass rates meet or exceed the national standard, and in predominantly Title 1 schools. Game On is now our fastest-growing program, and this year it remains free to most schools.
There is a dimension to this that has become impossible to ignore: AI. The students entering our classrooms today will spend their careers working alongside AI tools, not around them. Being AI-native — knowing how to direct, interrogate, and build with artificial intelligence — will be as fundamental to their futures as knowing how to write or code. Unity understood this before most. With Unity AI woven directly into the game-creation process, the same engine our students learn to design in becomes the place they learn to master AI tools: they use generative tools purposefully, iterate with intelligence, and make the creative decisions that machines cannot make for them. Game design, it turns out, is one of the most natural on-ramps to AI fluency that exists, because building a game demands that you understand what a tool can do and where your own judgment has to take over. We’re launching active creators, not passive consumers.
Adapt or Die
I’ve come to see Unity as an allegory for Urban Arts.
Unity built the most widely used real-time 3D engine in the world, and it built it for game developers. That same engine now reaches far beyond games, into automotive design, architecture, manufacturing, simulation, and immersive AR/VR. And the thread running through all of it today is AI: Unity has put generative, AI-assisted creation at the heart of how anything gets built on its platform. Unity didn’t sprawl. It stayed disciplined about a powerful core and let that core travel. Focus first, then reach.
Urban Arts made the same move.
We teach game design. But our mission was never to produce a generation of game designers — that would be setting students up for a very narrow path. Our mission is to cultivate computational thinkers, problem-solvers, and storytellers who are technically expert and creatively confident. People who understand how technology shapes culture, and who have the tools to shape it back. In 2026, that means people who know how to use AI, how to question it, and how to lead it toward something worth making.
The proof is in where our students go. Roughly half major in computer science. The rest study animation, engineering, neuroscience, chemistry, cybersecurity, business, mathematics, even law. Game design was never the destination. It was the on-ramp. And increasingly, AI fluency is part of what students carry off that ramp with them.
Designing for the Long Arc
Early design choices determine long-term outcomes, and a few of ours compounded in ways I couldn’t have scripted. Unity’s CEO, Matt Bromberg, has become increasingly involved in our work. Unity’s COO, Alex Blum, joined our Board of Directors and has become an essential voice in how we build the next chapter of Urban Arts.
Choosing Unity put our students inside a professional-grade ecosystem, one that now includes some of the most accessible and powerful AI creation tools available to any developer, anywhere. Choosing game design placed them at the intersection of art and technology. Choosing focus positioned Urban Arts to scale.
We decided to measure success by trajectory, not attendance. This year, 100% of our seniors received college acceptances and earned $25 million in scholarships, bringing our cumulative total to $71 million since we leaned into game design as a pathway to college and career.
What We’re Building Next
These first eight years proved the model works. The question I’m focused on now is how far it can travel: how many more classrooms, how many more districts, how many more students who were never supposed to end up in a CS space, a VFX studio, a research lab, or on an AI team?
The students we serve are not behind the curve, they are becoming future ready, using the same tools the industry uses.
That’s the work ahead, and it’s the kind of work that only happens with the right partners and believers alongside us. Unity showed us what it looks like to adapt toward a bigger purpose. We intend to do the same, at scale.
If you’re building toward the same future, I’d like to hear from you.
