By Sara ​Vogel

This past weekend at the youth digital media challenge, Emoti-Con, a whopping ten teams of youth representing eight Global Kids school sites showcased games and other projects they had spent the year or semester developing.

Beaming with pride, they spoke to judges and other passersby at the project fair about the elements of their games, their games’ backstories and topics, the challenges that cropped up during the coding process, and the iterative cycle.

The event exposed students to professionals in fields the youth were interested in, including art design, coding, game design, and business operation.

A user experience designer described his job as making sure that the company doesn’t design products that people don’t like and won’t use. In response, 6th grader Joseph Cruz remarked, “Oh, like the Apple watch?”

Global Kids youth leaders from Academy for Health Careers walked away from the event with one of the coveted top 5 awards, Best Point of View, for their project “Squad Up: Finding Kathy,” a geo-locative game that explores the life of a teen who must gather support for a friend in trouble, teaching players about the Convention on the Rights of the Child in the process.

The youth at Bryant High School’s game, “Life of a Queens Teen: Daniella’s Journey” won an honorable mention, as did the Twine game “On the Run,” produced by Playing for Keeps Citywide participants.

Don’t just take our word for it! The game designers at Bryant High School, working with trainer Neha Gautam, put together a narrated slide show of images from the awesome day: