Hasta La Ideas

Last year, the Obama administration received plenty of praise from video game makers for their launch of two game design competitions withing the new National STEM Video Game Challenge, one prize for students and another for professional developers. But what is giveth may at any time being taketh away, it seems. Gamesutra reports that this year’s STEM competition has just been launched (STEM, by the way, stands for science, technology, engineering and math) and now appears to exclude the professional side, instead focused strictly on the youth side, ranging from middle school and through onto academics designing educational video games. Granted, the developers prize wasn’t all that substantial last year, the $50,000 given to Filament Games for their game, You Make Me Sick!, still must have been a substantial help to the budding educational game company. As of now, the STEM organizers haven’t addressed why this secondary section of the competition was dropped, but at the moment it appears that they’ve simply decided to shift the focus to solely encouraging students to become interested and engaged in video game design.

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