A newsmaker you should know: Sophomore puts love of computer games to work
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Andrew Duerig
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Like many students his age, Andrew Duerig, 16, loves to play computer games.
But the North Hills High School sophomore has taken his passion one step further and has started developing his own computer games.
In recognition for his efforts in computing programming and creating games, the Ross teenager recently was selected to receive the Zulama Online Video Game Academy Scholarship from Waterfront Learning.
The value of the scholarship, given all the coursework, projects and opportunities, is about $750 per student.
According to Andrew and Waterfront Learning's website, he will study video game design and development by participating in an online "Games Through the Ages" course that started last month and runs through June.
This summer, he will attend a Game Design Studio Boot Camp at Carnegie Mellon University. In November, he will participate in the Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference.
"I basically want to learn how to make better games and this will help me," Andrew said.
Andrew has four years of programming experience already.
"I started when I was about 12 and started playing around with Flash. I had developed a pretty simple game when I was 13," he said, explaining that Flash is a program that has many applications including game development.
In addition to learning on his own, Andrew has enrolled in digital design classes taught by teacher Rueben Clark at his high school.
Mr. Clark was impressed with Andrew as his student.
"I knew right away that Andrew was extremely talented in programming at a young age," Mr. Clark said. "It is exciting to help him to continue to develop these skills."
Next year, Mr. Clark plans on offering an advanced programming class.
"We developed this class for students exactly like Andrew, who are ready for the next programming challenge," he said.
Andrew learned of the video game academy scholarship opportunity through Mr. Clark and was told by his guidance counselor that he had been chosen.
"I was pretty happy," he said.
Andrew said Mr. Clark's classes have helped him to identify and solve programming problems. "He has taught me to keep at something and figure out how to work though [programming errors]."
Andrew said he has created three games that he feels are "competition worthy" for other gamers and plans to create more, especially now that he will be participating in the Waterfront classes.
He plans to study computer programming in college, although not necessarily game development.
"I think this will help me and it will look good on my college applications," said Andrew. "It is pretty cool."
First Published February 2, 2012 5:41 am
