Students Designing Video Games about Immunology: Insights for Science Learning

Exposing American K-12 students to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) content is a national initiative. Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration targets students from underserved communities and uses their interest in video games as a way to introduce science, technology, engineering, and math topics. This article describes a Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration summer program for 16 high school students and 3 college student mentors who collaborated with a science subject matter expert. After four weeks, most students produced 2-D video games with themes based on immunology concepts from the educational science game Immune Attack. Findings from three groups that finished their games and one group with an uncompleted game are explored.