This summer, a garden in Manhattan became a video game, students in the Bronx built entire worlds from scratch, and hundreds more joined in from across the country! Beyond Urban Arts’ usual Game Academy programs, our middle and high schools students plugged into game design through two Summer Rising residencies, two Bronx workshops, and our national StoryQuest Camp, using open-source tools from Threadbare by Endless Access.
MS297 and 08X371
Summer Rising is New York City’s free summer program for public school students, combining academic support with hands-on enrichment. At MS297 in Manhattan, Urban Arts teacher Caroline Turret guided roughly 100 rising 6th-8th graders through a summer exploring St. Luke’s, a nearby public garden. Through Threadbare: Explore, each class built its own platformer level in Godot themed around the garden, dodging cars, flies, and bees through city streets. At 08X371, a Summer Rising site in the Bronx, Urban Arts teacher Dario Bolivar led 65 sixth graders through the full game-making process: brainstorming, art, animation, music, storytelling, and marketing.
Testimonial Video by Dario: Watch here
Fordham U
We also ran two workshops with Fordham University’s Liberty Partnerships Program (LPP), supporting 40 Bronx middle and high schoolers on the path to college. Taught by Caroline alongside Urban Arts alum Paola Soto, students built character animations for a 2D platformer, including one who created a full set of assets for a squirrel collecting acorns. A parent wrote that their son “couldn’t stop talking about today” as the experience broadened students’ sense of future paths in STEM.
StoryQuest Camp
Rounding out the summer, StoryQuest Camp — an online game design “sprint” with students joining virtually from across the country — brought together 119 students across four cohorts, taught by Urban Arts alumni MG Irvine and Richard Nguyen. Students built ambitious final levels in Explore: Godot, from dash mechanics and gravity flips to grapple hooks and full boss fights. As MG put it, “it was really cool seeing who was interested in narrative, or art, or coding, and seeing how they all tackled different problems in their own way.”
Built with Endless, brought to life by our students. Thank you to all of our partners this summer!
