Making the Game They Want to Play And Becoming the Programmer They Want to Be

The problem: The traditional "educational games" found in out-of-school-time environments like libraries and community centers can fail students because they feel forced, tutorial-heavy, or less fun than alternative activities. If students don't choose to engage or revisit the experience, the learning doesn't stick. 

The solution: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute tackled this challenge head-on by working with youth to co-design a portfolio of educational games for community centers, libraries and other afterschool clubs in and around Pittsburgh. 

With funding from the National Science Foundation's Player-Programmed Partner Games (P3G) project and iterative testing, design sessions, and gameplay trials, the team built games that are inviting, playable and fun for the learners. 

The impact: The P3G project reached more than 2.6 million learners in the U.S. in the last year, and more than 3.4 million in the last 3 years. 

• Because the games are ones students choose to play and return to, the intrinsic motivation to "do better" in the game drives real learning. 
• As students revisit programming to refine their partner robot, they build identity as programmers and roboticists—because they want to, not because they're being told to. 
• P3G research shows that when learners have meaningful agency in game design and play, they engage more, persist longer, and explore deeper computational thinking. 

The P3G project is part of the CS-STEM Network, which serves as the digital hub for multiple National Science Foundation—funded curricula, learning environments, and games developed at Carnegie Mellon University. This sustained support ensures that educators and students around the world have access to high-quality, research-based learning resources—from intelligent tutoring systems and certification programs to hands-on robotics challenges and data-driven teacher tools. 

Go deeper: P3G: Player-Programmed Partner Games