Cullen Samsa, a senior at La Follette High School, has dreamed of a career in video game design for the better half of the decade. He traces his passion back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when seemingly unlimited time at home allowed him to explore video games beyond playing them.
“Once you know how something’s made, you start to appreciate what you see,” Samsa said. “As soon as I started to realize how these games were made, I became even more fascinated with them.”
For most of high school, Samsa took computer science classes that nudged him toward game design. But when La Follette High rolled out a new course this school year — the Madison district’s first of its kind — he finally found the class he had been seeking…