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Have you ever seen a 14-year-old walk you through a video game they built from scratch?
And then listened as the kid explained why the second level was harder than the first and what they had to fix when the main character kept falling through the floor. And then looked at the kid’s report card and saw a sea of D’s and F’s across the board communicating the not so subtle inference to anyone who likes to make “data driven decisions” that the kid at hand is an unintelligent, skill-less, miscreant clearly without any drive, passion, energy or capacity for learning.
Lately, we’re seeing more and more energy around video game design curriculum… and for good reason! A story out of Kern County this year captures it excellently well: Put the right kind of challenge in front of students and suddenly the kids we struggle to engage can become the ones who refuse to leave the room.
What began as a small experiment, hoping to attract a handful of students, quickly turned into an overcrowded classroom filled with fourth- through eighth-graders eager to show off the games they had coded and designed themselves. They weren’t just playing. They were debugging, problem-solving, iterating, explaining their design choices, defending their work, and demonstrating skills that traditional measures of achievement can too easily overlook.
More and more, the question isn’t whether a student has the drive, intelligence, or capacity to learn. Nowadays, particularly post-pandemic, the question is whether we’ve given them something they actually want to learn.
What Happened at Kern County's First Skoolcade?
The Kern Codes Skoolcade game design competition for grades 4 to 8 took place on April 23rd, 2026. It was the first competition of its kind in Kern County, California, and the day saw more than a hundred students, parents, teachers, and judges packed into the Kern County Superintendent of Schools' new STEAM Yard.
This competition saw elementary and middle schoolers go head-to-head to design the best original video game, putting their creativity and technical skills to the test. However, throughout the competition, these learners also showcased their persistence and collaborative skills, which are becoming increasingly important in a digital world.
What surprised even me is that the turnout far exceeded expectations. It caught organizers off guard, with Justin Janssen, the STEM program specialist who helped run and judge the event, having braced himself for maybe four or five schools. Yet, the reality is that he got to watch, in his words, “close to 75 students create well over 50 games in our very first year."
I don’t know about you, but in my books, this is irrefutable proof that game design might be something more schools need to start embracing. And no one needs to reinvent the wheel to pull off something like this in their county, whether it be in California or elsewhere. After all, the Skoolcade competition was dreamed up by the Ventura County Office of Education and then handed off to Kern County, where it now runs under the Kern Codes banner. The competition itself was part of Kern Code's broader effort not only to inspire the next generation of innovators but also to expand computer science education.
Why Does a Student Game Design Competition Matter?
Now I know all about the naysayers who feel game design competitions are a waste of time. But many who would like to put a stop to such activities fail to fully understand why competitions like Kern Code's Skoolcade matter in the grand scheme of things.
For starters, for a lot of kids, a competition is the only door into computer science they are ever given. It's often one of the only things to give them motivation while fostering their passion. If you don’t believe me, the 2025 State of Computer Science Education report spells out how little attention to this subject is truly given:
- Roughly 6 in 10 U.S. public high schools offer a foundational computer science course, and that share has stopped climbing, holding flat for the last couple of years instead of growing.
- Just 6.1 percent of high school students actually enroll in a computer science course, a number that slipped last year instead of rising, and girls make up only about a third of even that small group.
- As recently as 2024, only about 37 percent of middle schools offered any computer science at all.
- California still doesn't require computer science to graduate. At all.
When you consider the above, I think it's plain to see why Skoolcade is such a big deal. The competition and any others that may come out of it in the future target exactly the ages, fourth through eighth grade, where kids are old enough to catch the coding bug but young enough that hardly anyone is offering it to them yet.
That is the window where a spark either takes hold or fizzles out for good, usually long before high school ever gets its shot. So when a county goes and builds its own game-design competition for its youngest kids, it is reaching them at the exact moment the rest of the system tends to shrug and let them wander off.
How Does Building a Game Teach Real Skills?
When some people, whether parents or educators, hear the word ‘game’, they begin to question if it can even teach a child anything. That’s because there is a stigma surrounding teaching game development, coding, and even computer science.
In fact, at the school board level, many find ‘games' a waste of time and feel that subjects like esports aren’t real academics, but this is untrue, and the Kern County competition is the perfect example of why. It demonstrates that even though, for a young learner, it doesn’t feel like they are receiving a computer science lesson at all- they are.
For instance, the competition students were learning skills such as writing logic, fixing code that doesn't work, telling a story, adapting to difficulties, and rebuilding what doesn't work. So, although what they were doing seemed like something cool and challenging, it was helping them become adept at something they may want to pursue as they grow older.
That right there is a big part of why Mastery Coding exists. We built our coding and game development curriculum so the fun comes first and the real skills come with it. So, with our course, a room full of kids building games looks like play, but in reality it is a computer science course that none of them had to be talked into taking.
The Real Lesson From Kern County
The real lesson is that there is an opportunity sitting in front of every district in the country. Every school has the capability to foster the passion that already exists in its students and direct it towards computer science. Because if there’s anything the story that came out of Kern County told us, it's that all children need is a foothold into computer science.
Nobody had to sell these kids on computer science, because they were having too much fun building something they were proud of. So much fun, in fact, that they hardly noticed they had been learning the entire time.
So, if you would like to help your learners with an interest in gaming and computer science realise their passion, come see how our game design and computer science curriculum at Mastery Coding works inside a real classroom. Then, if we’ve piqued your interest, why not schedule a demo so we can sit and talk about the students you are trying to reach?
