Zikomo Williams is a gamer. Mostly sports games, he says. He played a lot of Fortnite when he was younger, but these days, as a rising senior at Henderson Collegiate High School, he sticks mostly to sports games.
What he is not – and he’ll tell you this – is a hardware or software guy. His main academic and career interests lie in financing.
But when he heard about a four-day NCSSM-faciliated summer program on the school’s Morganton campus called INSPIRE (for Introducing STEM Pathways Through Inquiry and Research Experiences) that shows students how to create their own games, he was intrigued.
INSPIRE introduces academically talented participants from a wide range of backgrounds to STEM research and helps cultivate their leadership skills and competencies with experiences in STEM research and in solving complex, real-world problems. And of the four program courses offered this summer, Zikomo was especially interested in one called Epic Games-Next Gen Creators Academy.
In the course, Zikomo and seven others used Epic Games’ Unreal Editor for Fortnite to learn how to build interactive cross-platform games and experiences within one of the most popular virtual ecosystems in the world.
For the four days of the program, Zikomo sat focused in front of a powerful laptop computer in an NCSSM-Morganton classroom and used Epic’s software and the skills he was learning from the course instructor to create his own game in which a player had to navigate a maze.
“Most of the time we were placing stuff into our world, and programming certain items to do what we wanted them to do,” Zikomo says. “My maze had kind of a ruins appearance and I added grass to make it look abandoned. We learned to do really complex things, too, like add sliding or moving doors into the game, change the weather, and put in monsters and program them to act a certain way.”
This summer marked INSPIRE’s fifth summer in Morganton, where the program has operated since its inception. Twenty-one rising juniors and seniors from all over North Carolina spent the better part of a week in the Morganton area working with mentors who led the courses. In addition to the game development course Zikomo was in, there was a biopharmaceutical manufacturing course created by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center called NIIMBL bioLOGIC, an emergency management course run through Burke County Emergency Communications, and a healthcare course run through Catawba Valley Medical Center.
For many, if not most, students, INSPIRE marked the first time they got to work so closely with career professionals.
“The value of the program is especially for students who have not had opportunities to work with mentors before,” says Gerri Cole, NCSSM’s Associate Director of STEM Access and Outreach. “It gives them an opportunity to see what it’s like to work in the STEM field.”
But working with mentors isn’t the only benefit of INSPIRE. “There are also a number of enrichment activities that the students participate in outside of their mentorship placement that are focused on team-building,” Cole adds. “In those activities they learn leadership skills and how to communicate with one another and trust one another and respect one another. That’s what they’re doing outside of their mentorship placement.”
There’s one other thing that INSPIRE promotes, Cole says, that is as important to developing the future STEM workforce as are any of the hands-on activities.
“A lot of times when we’re asking students about what their areas of interest are, especially in their applications, they’ll say, ‘I want to go into medicine,’ or, ‘I want to go into engineering.’ But sometimes they don’t know about different pathways within those categories. INSPIRE gives them exposure to pathways that they may not have necessarily considered.”
Zikomo experienced that. Though focused on game-building, he discovered just how flexible the software was.
“The Unreal engine and programming is not just used for games,” he says. “Companies use it for advertisements and promotions, so it’s definitely applicable outside of just video games.”
Nate Myers, Zikomo’s course instructor and a Raleigh-Durham area high school computer science teacher and educational consultant who has been teaching summer enrichment courses for NCSSM for several years, says he makes it a point to foster realizations such as Zikomo’s.
“I always try to make connections for the students in terms of all the different potential career opportunities within the gaming industry and outside of the video game design industry. There are all these different ways that the skills that they learn can be applied to a multitude of things.”
Zikomo is still leaning towards a career in finance, but he’s happy he explored game building through INSPIRE which, as a program, produced results just as originally planned.
“It opened my eyes to the tech world,” he says.
