One Saturday afternoon in March, forty-four boys and girls of various races clustered around computers in Menlo Innovations’ cavernous office under the Liberty Square parking structure. One group was building castles and dispatching zombies at stupendous speed, while another group was sending blocky characters careening across the screen in every direction.
They were all deep into it, especially one little guy who was supplying his own vivid sound effects. But they weren’t just playing video games–they were learning to rewrite them and create their own animations. And this was just one of three classes that day. In all, 100 first-through-eighth graders were giving up part of their Saturdays to learn programming–and loving it.
GameStart is the brainchild of Nate Aschenbach and David Arditti. Each was born in 1985, the year the first Nintendo came out. Each moved here as a kid and went to Pioneer High, where they became friends. Neither remembers a time before video games.
“I went to school [at the University of Wisconsin-Madison] for art,” says the very intense Aschenbach, “but also I did a bunch of independent studies in digital art and animation. I teamed up with programmers in the computer science department, and we started several companies around making apps and video games. They all went under, and I ran out of money, so I came back to live in my parents’ basement.” At that point he took a job at Menlo, “where I developed my skills as a software developer for four years before jumping onto GameStart.”
The much more relaxed Arditti got his degree in adolescent and young adult education and social studies from Bowling Green. He developed a science teaching program for poor schools as an AmeriCorps member and substitute taught in Austin, Chicago, and Ann Arbor before he, too, found his way to Menlo. He worked there a little over a year before transitioning to GameStart.
The idea was Aschenbach’s. “When I moved back I hadn’t given up on the last of my game start-ups, [but] my other teammates were still in Madison and slowly getting jobs in the real video game industry and making real salaries. When I came to Menlo, part of the reasoning was that they were really friendly with start-ups.
“Half the time I was a software developer, and the other half of the time I was one of their high-tech anthropologists,” he explains, “designers who go out into the field and observe the end users so they can make sure what they’re developing will fit clients’ needs.”
Aschenbach liked the work, but his heart was elsewhere. “I’d done the video game thing a couple of times, and I was trying to come up with a way that was more sustainable emotionally as well as financially. I reached out to David ’cause I knew he’d worked with a lot of underprivileged school programs and wasn’t having the impact that he was hoping to have. I thought, ‘Why not coax David to come up here [and] start a company where half the time we’re teaching kids how to make video games and half the time we’re making our own video games?’
“At first it was a vehicle to spin David up as a software developer, to get him the skills to make video games. I was an artist. I figured if I can do it, he can do it too.”
Aschenbach had already laid the groundwork with Menlo CEO Rich Sheridan. In April 2013, “Menlo had paid for a table at Maker Fair in Detroit, and they didn’t have any activities, so David and I were like, ‘We’ll go run this programming curriculum that we’ve built for these Raspberry Pis,’ small computers about the size of a credit card that cost about $35 apiece that we paid for out of our own pockets.”
“They were so cheap we could start a company on them,” jokes Arditti.
“We were showing off what we’d done, a really simple programming interface so kids could approach it,” says Aschenbach. “We got so much interest and so many parents were asking about it that we decided we had to schedule a class for the kids to come back.” Menlo agreed to host, and on September 21, 2013, twenty-some kids showed up for a ninety-minute workshop.
They invited the kids to come back–and they did, and brought their friends. “After a few sessions of that we came up with the six-week model where we knew we would cover everything we wanted to cover,” Aschenbach recalls.
Their timing couldn’t have been better: that December, a post on the official White House blog urged all American students to become computer-literate–and not just as users. “Don’t just buy a new video game, make one,” President Obama urged in a video. “Don’t just download the latest app, help design it. Don’t just play on your phone, program it.”
Today GameStart offers more than a dozen different classes. “We get kids from all over the place,” says Aschenbach. “We’ve got folks who drive from as far as two hours away. There’re a lot of kids who connect with the stuff that we do here who have never been able to connect with sports or anything else, so their parents are, ‘Oh, man, we found it: the thing that they’re finally putting their energy into!'”
Enrollment varies wildly. “There’s one class that has one student, one that has eighteen, one that has ten,” Arditti says. Ninety-seven kids paid $195 apiece for the six-class spring session I watched. That’s almost $20,000–enough to build a real organization.
The partners now have nineteen folks on staff, eight of them full-time. “We start people off as volunteers,” says Aschenbach, “and once they’re engaged and they’re good at it, we start to pay them hourly. Eventually, if they’re around enough, we give them a flat rate per week. At that point they’re usually helping us come up with new curriculum and develop the software we use in class.”
Like Aschenbach and Arditti, most of the staff looks to be an amalgam of cool nerds and scruffy hipsters in their late twenties. “A lot of the folks you see around here are high school friends we’ve coaxed into jumping on board,” explains Aschenbach.
He says they considered a lot of names for the company. “We settled on GameStart ’cause if you picture an old-school Nintendo controller, there’s a start button on it. And that was what drove the idea: this is the start of whatever game they want to play.”
They weren’t worried about being sued by GameStop, the video game chain?
“We settled out of court,” laughs Arditti.
“No, we’re not worried about it,” says Aschenbach earnestly.
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When they launched GameStart, “we thought it would be a game development company that had a teaching side,” says Aschenbach. But he’s found that “the classes, and the software that I make to teach the classes, scratches that same itch [as developing games]. It’s just as rewarding for me to make this curriculum, these games, that kids show up once a week, play, and enjoy–while I get to watch them play and enjoy.”
Now the partners are “trying to figure out what we want to grow into,” Aschenbach continues. “Do we want to be this group that’s finding grant opportunities? Or do we want to develop the software and the curriculum and put that out for other teachers? Or do we want to be just a giant school and run these classes ourselves all the time?”
Whichever path they choose, GameStart’s founders are on a mission. “We believe we understand games in a way that’s different than the earlier generation,” Aschenbach says. “We believe that there’s learning potential in games, and we would like to unlock that. We think that the existing school system is very broken, but there are a lot of things about school that are very game-like that could be done much better if the folks who were in charge of teaching classes had a better understanding of game design and a better understanding of all those [programming] principles.”
“For me a lot of it was to let [young people] know they can do this,” says Arditti, “to let them know this is an option, that they’re not too stupid, that nobody’s too stupid, to do it.”
“You could have no experience at all when you come in here,” Aschenbach adds. “But what you can’t do is say ‘I’m not a programmer, I’m not good at math.'”
GameStart outgrew Menlo Innovations’ basement space this spring. In April, it opened its own 2,550-square-foot location inside Plymouth Mall. While they’re not longer in the downtown tech hub, “most of the people who come to these classes aren’t just walking down the street from downtown apartments,” Arditti explains. “A lot of time they’re driving from pretty far away, and the new site is closer to the highway.” Between Saturday classes and summer camps, they currently have 200 kids enrolled in on-site programs–and with funds donated by the College Gamers Association, they’re adding classes at the Children’s Center in Detroit.
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It sounds like both parents and kids are responding to President Obama’s message.
“We’re in the right place at the right time to take advantage of that,” agrees Aschenbach. “We want to be giving the kids a sense of how to relate to technology. Tech is becoming more powerful faster than we can keep up with, and, for a lot of the kids who come through our door, what we can do is establish in their minds that this is a tool they can use to achieve their own ends. This isn’t a television channel that pumps information.”
No, these are video games: the things that, a generation ago, parents thought would rot their kids’ minds. But now they’re a bigger industry than xADHollywood–and as the president points out, they can also provide an entry into the world of high-tech careers.
“We might have been among the first wave of folks who viewed them as an art form,” says Aschenbach. “These guys are born with it.”
“It’s part of their world,” agrees Arditti. “Unless we go postapocalyptic any time soon, they’re going to have computers, and they can either be on the consumer end or the creative end. I would rather have more control over my life.”
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Coding in Detention
“It’s important to know that [teaching paid classes on] Saturday is just one slice of what we do,” says GameStart co-founder Nate Aschenbach. “Every day of the week we’re going off-site to teach classes through Rec & Ed, [EMU’s] Bright Futures, and we also teach at the district library and the Hands-On Museum. And we do some pro bono stuff with the Youth Arts Alliance” (see Up Front, p. 9).
The nonprofit alliance brings a “creative curriculum into juvenile detention centers,” he explains. “They do poetry, art, painting, and stuff like that, and we teamed up with them to bring out computers and teach there twice a week.”
“It’s a big boost to be able to program,” adds co-founder Dave Arditti. “You really go from zero to a hundred with just that little bit of information.”
The Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs awarded GameStart a $20,000 grant to provide workshops in all four counties the Youth Alliance works in: Washtenaw, Monroe, Jackson, and Livingston.
“It’s incredible,” says Alliance founder Heather Wilson. “They’ve taught approximately 150 kids, and they get these amazing testimonials. One girl wrote that she thought at first it was dumb, but by the end she really enjoyed it and thought this was something she could see herself pursuing.
“GameStart has found the most fascinating and creative ways to teach tech development,” Wilson continues, “and they’ve experienced tremendous successes. Exposing kids to arts and technology and providing a safe and comfortable place to take positive educational risks is crucial for kids in the juvenile justice system. And they’re developing highly marketable skills.”
