How to Get Inner-City Kids Into Tech?
Alumnus Damon Packwood is gaining national attention for turning them into ‘Gameheads’
In his nearly 20-year-long work with teens and young adults, alumnus Damon Packwood (MA ’14, Multimedia Studies) has always had an important rule:
“Pay attention to what your students are doing when they’re not doing what you told them to,” he says.
In Packwood’s case, when he started teaching tech to young people in Oakland, he would repeatedly turn around to find his students playing video games on their phones. “I really just wanted to get their attention,” he says. So, on a lark, he offered a one-hour session during the students’ lunch break to talk to them about the prospect of making websites for video games.
They weren’t impressed.