Middle schoolers light up Philadelphia skyscraper with original video games

Middle school students lit up the Philadelphia skyline Friday night with video games they designed themselves as part of Philly Tech Week and the America 250 celebration.

Drexel University transformed the Cira Centre into what organizers called the world's largest playable video game display, projecting student-created games onto the building's 29-story LED wall overlooking Schuylkill Yards in University City.

The games were developed through the Skyscraper Games project, organized by the nonprofit Young Futures. Students learned coding and game design while creating games for a virtual model of the Cira Centre.

"I think it's going to be really fun to see how the game I made in a studio would be projected up there," student designer Jake Lee said.

For many students, the project offered their first experience with coding.

"It was confusing, all the coding and stuff," student designer Jessie Lee said. "It was my first time getting used to it."

Drexel University's Entrepreneurial Game Studio helped transform the students' creations into fully playable games displayed across the skyscraper-sized screen.

"We get to take the creativity of these wonderful young people and put them up on a gigantic canvas," said Erin Truesdell, an assistant professor of informatics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. "Today's really a culmination and a celebration of that. We've got four wonderful student games that we'll be showing tonight, in addition to, of course, the classic skyscraper Tetris."

Dozens of people gathered in Drexel Square to watch and play the games, including several members of Philadelphia City Council.

Frank Lee, a Drexel University professor of digital media known for creating the original skyscraper-sized Tetris display more than a decade ago, said the project is designed to inspire students to pursue careers in technology and computing.

"This is part motivation for them to become excited to then pursue, hopefully, a computing-related field in college, as well as then move on and go on to a computing field as part of their work," Lee said.