Skins is a video game workshop for Aboriginal youth offered by an Aboriginally determined team of game designers, artists and educators known as AbTeC.

The unique curriculum begins with traditional storytelling and proceeds to teach participants how to tell a story in a very new way--as a video game. With that foundation in place, the students then learn important skills for the production of video games and virtual environments, such as game design, art direction, 3D modeling and animation, sound, and computer programming.

The lessons are taught by a mix of game-industry professionals, Aboriginal artists and a core team of senior Concordia students from the Computation Arts undergraduate programme. We have also invited Aboriginal mentors who lend their considerable expertise as cultural consultants and provide moral support to the young producers.

Skins aims to empower Native youth to be more than just consumers of new technologies by showing them how to be producers of them.

Skins 1.0 was prototyped at Kahnawake Survival School from September 2008 to June 2009. The students designed a game called Otsi: Rise of the Kanien'keha:ka Legends. Otsi: won the Best New Media Award at imagineNative 2010. You can view a draft of our curriculum here and the blog here.

Skins 2.0 took place from July 16 - 29, 2011 at Concordia University in Montreal. To see what was made, visit the blog.