From Gardens to Game Levels: An Endless Summer of World-Building
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 Endless Studios’ Threadbare.
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
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.
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.
From PONG to the Metaverse: Urban Arts and Tilt Five Bring Together Gaming’s Pioneers and Its Next Builders
Back-to-school webinar connects the origins of video games with the skills and career pathways available to students creating games today
As students head back to school this fall, national non-profit Urban Arts and independent studio Tilt Five are highlighting something that captures the attention of millions of young people: video games. But this webinar is about more than playing games. It is about what students can learn by creating them, and how game design can open doors to careers in computer science, engineering, art, design, and creative technology.
On September 10, Urban Arts and Tilt Five will host “From Pong and Atari to Today’s Generation of Game Creators 👾,” bringing together two generations of game creators: Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer who created the original PONG, and an Urban Arts graduate who designs, builds, and teaches games.
For teachers and schools, the webinar will provide a look at how game design can engage students in computer science while connecting classroom learning to real-world careers. For students, it will offer a chance to hear how one of the earliest commercial video games was created, see projects from Urban Arts alumni, and learn what it takes to turn an idea into something people can actually play.
From Shortcut to Power Tool: Reflections on Our First Founders Lab
Founders Lab, an AI-first startup accelerator built for technically skilled high school seniors who are ready to build, launched this August. Founder’s Lab is an accelerator where high school students from under-resourced NYC communities form startup teams and use AI tools across every stage—market research, prototyping, code scaffolding, go-to-market—to build a live, investor-ready product. No idea-to-deck simulation: real Demo Day, real judges from the venture community, real money for the winning team.
Access That Changes Everything: Inside Urban Arts’ 3rd Annual College Forum
For students from low-income communities, the biggest barrier to college often isn’t ambition, it’s access. Last Friday, Urban Arts hosted its 3rd Annual College Forum at PwC in midtown, free through our College Access Program, ensuring our students enjoy direct access to both higher education leaders and college representatives.
Director of Post-Secondary Success Joelle Blackstock hosted and organized an hour-long panel featuring two industry leaders committed to expanding pathways for all students, with Urban Arts alum and ambassador Faiza Mohammed serving as moderator:
Dr. Charles J. Gibbs, Ed.D., President of Metropolitan College of New York
Sabrina Avila, Senior Manager of the STEM Research Academy at CUNY K16 Initiatives & Adult Pathways
Students and parents called the conversation “inspiring,” “encouraging,” “motivating,” and “very interesting.”
Esports Brings Students In. Game Design Takes Them Further.
This June, Urban Arts and NASEF co-hosted a webinar on esports, game design, and why schools should think about the connection between the two. Participants shared ways esports can help bring students into school communities and how game design can take them further.
Urban Arts is the national nonprofit that teaches digital game design as a pathway to college and career, offering programs to open doors in STEM and the arts. NASEF, the Network of Academic and Scholastic Esports Federation, is a nonprofit and global network that uses esports for competition, learning, career exploration, and skill development.
College Fellows: Inaugural Year for a Game-changing Program
Urban Arts teaches video game design as a pathway to college and career. Plus, we offer a free College Access program, boosting futures in STEM and the arts. Our pilot College Fellows program hired five alumni as advisors, providing paid positions with pre-professional training, a schedule that works for them, and a resume building block.
For young people, the most authentic guides are those who have just walked the walk, which is why we invest in our alumni with paid, purpose-driven opportunities to support the next generation. Through the College Fellows program, current college students bring their real-world experience, empathy, and hard-earned knowledge back to current high school seniors, offering weekly near-peer mentorship across applications, essays, financial aid, and everything in between. It works. 100% of Urban Arts seniors are accepted to college and they’ve earned $71M in scholarships since 2020.
Within the 31 students served in the Fellows program, they earned $8.4M in aid.
20 Years of the Nagler Scholar
Twenty years ago, Urban Arts Board Member Niclas Nagler and his family created The Nagler Scholarship to enable high school students from low-income communities to define their future. Each year, one winning scholar is awarded $60,000 to pursue their dreams. We are proud to celebrate 20 Years of the Nagler Scholar and this life-changing initiative, made possible by the generosity of the Nagler family.
Nagler scholars are artists, computer wizards, designers, teachers, entrepreneurs, and global changemakers. They exemplify leadership in their schools, a demonstrable focus and vision for their post-secondary careers, and a strong desire to use their talents and skills to impact the community.
Game Design Is an Economic Mobility Engine. We Have $71 Million in Proof.
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.
Urban Arts’ Class of 2026 Achieves 100% College Acceptance Rate, Bringing Cumulative Scholarship Total to $71 Million Since 2020
A group of teenagers from low-income communities across New York City has earned $25 million in college scholarships this year, not through a traditional academic pipeline, but through video games.
These students are not outliers. Urban Arts, the national nonprofit that teaches video game design as a pathway to college and career, announced that its Class of 2026 has achieved a 100% college acceptance rate. This year’s results bring Urban Arts’ cumulative scholarship total to more than $71 million. All instruction and college access services are provided free of charge to students and their families.
At the Urban Arts Game Academy, students build original games, creating narrative, music, animation; pitch their work to industry professionals for real-world feedback, learning entrepreneurship, iteration, teamwork; and graduate with portfolios, credentials, and career networks that most of their peers, at any income level, don’t have.
Celebrating Gary Andersen: Game On Teacher Named Finalist for NC CTE Teacher of the Year
As we finish up the 2025-26 school year, we are proud to celebrate our outstanding Game On by Urban Arts teachers. One of those incredible teachers is Gary Andersen, Computer Science teacher at A.L. Brown High School in Kannapolis, NC, who was named a finalist for the NCCAT 2026 Burroughs Wellcome Fund North Carolina Career & Technical Education Teacher of the Year Award. Gary was one of 23 exceptional educators selected from across North Carolina for this distinction, and he joined his fellow finalists for a week of professional development before being honored at a special ceremony this past December.