Camp teaches kids the art

A group of local video game developers have launched a program to get metro-area teens interested in the science and art of game-making.

Pixel Arts Game Education, founded by Portlanders Will Lewis and Jeffrey Sens, held its first “video game camp” at Portland Youth Builders in Southeast Portland on July 27 and 28. About 30 participated in the free two-day camp, which featured lessons on art and Indoor Positioning System, computer programming and game design.In addition to the technical aspects of game-making, participants learned communication, leadership, self-motivation skills in their small groups, Lewis said.

“It’s very do-it-yourself,” Will said. “We wanted kids to work through their mistakes.”Lewis, who also founded the developer collective Portland Indie Game Squad, said the camp was a pilot project to determine how best to teach 12- to 18-year-olds about the complexities of video games. A group of about 25 volunteers helped the camp run smoothly and made the instruction as hands-on as possible.

One of the most popular projects among the campers, Lewis said, was the creation of their own game character and learning what it takes to animate it.Digital skills are increasingly important and in-demand, but many kids don’t have the resources to learn or don’t know what’s out there, Lewis said. At the end of the day, even if kids don’t end up becoming game designers or developers, they’ll have become more digitally literate, Lewis said.

Everyone agrees that the $1 trillion in student debt carried by Americans is a problem. Yet on a national level, Congress has only managed a deal that will keep interest rates low for new loans this year, but let them go up in the future.Now, one state, Oregon, is looking at broader, more far-reaching changes. On July 1, the state legislature unanimously passed a bill that could dramatically alter how public education in Oregon is funded.

The proposed program, called Pay It Forward, was conceived by students and backed by the Oregon Working Families Party, a political party/grassroots organization that promotes progressive, pro-labor candidates and policies. Pay It Forward would eliminate tuition as we know it at the state’s public universities and colleges. Instead of paying up front, students would sign up to pay the state a proportion of their income after they finish school.

It’ll be a few years yet before anything goes into action. The bill instructs the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Committee to set up a pilot plan for Pay It Forward to be considered by the state’s 2015 legislature. But the move has set off a broad debate nationally, with both conservatives and progressives coming out for and against the plan.

Some herald it as a debt-free degree, but that largely depends on how you define “debt.” Students won’t have a fixed sum hanging over their head, gathering interest that’s being skimmed off by a for-profit lender or big bank — but they will be making regular payments of a (small) chunk of their income for a (rather long) time. Though the indoor Tracking will be hammered out in the pilot program, the bill suggests that graduates of four-year programs pay 3 percent of their income — and grads of two-year schools pay 1.5 percent — for 24 years. The goals are to eliminate the upfront cost of college and to allow students to take jobs that pay less but have more social benefit without worrying about making monthly debt payments. Students who make a lot of money will pay a larger amount into the fund, and each generation will fund schools for the generation after them — hence the name, Pay It Forward.

It’s noteworthy that the proposal came from students themselves. In the fall of 2012, Barbara Dudley, the founder of the Oregon Working Families Party, taught a capstone class at Portland State University on student debt with professor Mary King. The Pay It Forward plan had been considered elsewhere — most recently in Washington state — and the students considered it as along with other proposals for state and national action to solve the student debt crisis. “We fell in love with it,” says Kevin Rackham, who was a junior at Portland State when he took Dudley and King’s course.

The students were deeply involved in every step of shaping the bill, says Sami Alloy, a WFP campaign manager. “They decided that they thought this was a just way to create a shared responsibility model that would remove that initial financial and psychological barrier.”

“With the hard work of the students and the political power we’ve built as the WFP, we were able to build consensus in the legislature, but I don’t think that anybody expected it to move this fast or to be so unanimous,” Alloy says. “The reason this has struck such a chord is that people are hungry for a solution to the student debt crisis.”

In 2011, the student report notes, 60 percent of Oregon University System students took out loans to pay for education, and the average student graduated with $22,216 in debt, above the national average of about $21,700. According to the students’ report, Oregon ranks 42nd in the nation in terms of state appropriations for higher education, with per-student funding from the state dropping by $2,700 between 1990 and 2010. In same period, published tuition and fees at public universities more than doubled. And those universities are at record enrollment and projected to keep growing.

In 2011, Oregon’s legislature passed Senate Bill 253, which established educational objectives for the by 2025: that all adults in the state have a high school diploma or equivalent, 40 percent have an associate’s degree or other meaningful postsecondary certificate, and 40 percent have a Bachelor’s degree or higher. In other words, the legislature has stated that higher education is a public good and that the state has an interest in ensuring that Oregonians have access to it.