Mission Statement
Our nonprofit school’s mission is to inspire future engineers in our community through creative play. Our unique afterschool, summer camp, and game jam programs encourage kids away from the often isolated act of playing videogames by instead offering a fun, creative, and educational alternative through the collaborative social process of designing and coding a videogame. Our goal is to expose all kids to coding - which often means making an extra effort to attract girls, minorities, and low income kids who might otherwise not gain competency in STEM skills, confidence in the use of technology, or even consider a future career in engineering or Computer Science.
Description
DreamQuest Academy offers innovative programs for kids and teens ages 7 to 16 in the Denver and Boulder metro area. We offer STEM-based afterschool programs, game jam events, and summer camps that teach kids engineering and social skills through building videogames.
We leverage our students’ existing passions for videogames to teach them how to code in a fun and creative way: first they learn how to code mods in Minecraft, and then the fundamentals of game design and coding by creating their own unique RPG, FPS, Platformer, or 2D games in Unity, a leading commercial game development engine. Our classes fill the gap between existing elementary school CSed teaching tools like Scratch, Hopscotch, Bitsbox, or Agentsheets, and high school or college courses teaching AP Computer Science, Java, or other career-oriented programming courses.
DQ Academy is very unique in that it grew out of DreamQuest Games, a commercially successful game development studio with over 50 titles shipped for PC, game consoles, and mobile apps over the past 15 years. Our experienced developers now inspire and expose kids to the very real career possibilities that coding can provide. We motivate youth to challenge themselves by learning new skills, and promote the rewards of being a producer rather than just a consumer of videogames. Our uniquely engaging and creative programs are ideal to expose technology to those with limited access, build proficiency and confidence in themselves, and open their minds to the possibility of a career in Computer Science and Engineering.
