The AMD Foundation selected the following non-profit organizations to receive pilot year support from AMD Changing the Game in 2009:

• Skillpoint Alliance (Austin, TX): Skillpoint Alliance is a nonprofit organization that builds partnerships among industry, education and the community, leading to college and career success for Central Texans, while meeting employers’ needs for a qualified workforce. The AMD Foundation will fund, Game On!, a four-week, project-based internship experience in which 20 high school students will design and produce socially conscious video games. Topic area experts and video game developers will support the student development process through lectures and hands-on training and demonstrations.
  
  
• The World Wide Workshop Foundation (New York City, NY): The World Wide Workshop is a global foundation for developing educational technology applications that intertwine social media technology and game production to enhance learning, innovation, entrepreneurship, and an understanding of the world in economically disadvantaged and technologically underserved communities. The AMD Foundation will fund the integration of the World Wide Workshop Foundation’s Globaloria Program into the daily curriculum of Southwest Key’s East Austin College Prep Academy. Globaloria is a learning network of programmable websites, wikis and blogs that inspires and educates a new generation of youth game makers committed to changing the world for the better with their games.
  
  
• Southwest Key’s East Austin College Prep Academy (Austin, TX): Southwest Key’s mission is to advocate for children worldwide and to impact children, youth and families by empowering them to succeed. AMD, in partnership with The World Wide Workshop, will incorporate Globaloria, a proven in-school game curriculum and Web2.0 platform this fall with Southwest Key’s East Austin College Prep Academy, a new charter school that will serve 90 6th grade students.
  
  
• Games for Change Festival (New York, NY): For the second consecutive year, the AMD Foundation is proud to sponsor Let the Games Begin: A 101 Workshop on Making Social Issue Games. The kick-off event for the 6th annual Games for Change Festival, the workshop is a soup-to-nuts tutorial on the fundamentals of social issue games. The event will feature leading experts on essential topics such as game design, fundraising, evaluation, youth participation, distribution, and marketing strategies, and will be extended for the rest of the year through an online community dedicated to learning about social issue games. The 2009 Festival will take place May 27-29, at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City.
  
  
• The Learning Games Network (Boston, MA): The Learning Games Network (LGN) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established to spark innovation in the design and use of learning games. AMD and LGN are co-sponsoring the A-Ha Moment video contest, which challenges students to share their ideas on how education can and will change with digital games. The contest, open to U.S. students age 13 and older in middle school, high school and post-secondary school, consists of two main categories. The “A-Ha Moment” category asks contestants to create a video explaining how playing video games reinforced something they had first learned elsewhere. The “My Dream Assignment” category asks them to describe a game that could be “required playing” for a class. First-place winners in each age group will be eligible to receive a 16 inch HP Pavilion dv6 series notebook, powered by an AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor ZM-84.
  
  
• Game Design for New Literacies: Activities to Strengthen STEM Skills, Design Thinking, and Civic Engagement for Ages 9 to 15. This exciting new initiative builds on the success of the AMD-funded curriculum that PETLab designed for Boys & Girls Clubs of America. With “Game Design for New Literacies,” PETLab will make its existing educational modules even more compelling and accessible for youth audiences. The project will culminate in a set of fun, do-it-yourself-style learning activities for young people between the ages of 9 and 15. Among other enhancements to the earlier curriculum, the new version will incorporate additional activities for sharpening STEM skills. The activities will also be supplemented by new online tools and a community-building website to support collaborative projects and sharing of game designs. The final educational product will be adoptable by individual young people, after-school clubs, and even classroom teachers."
  
  
• Science Buddies (Carmel, CA): Science Buddies is a national nonprofit organization based in California's Silicon Valley offering a variety of web-based tools that help K-12 students explore science through research projects often done at science fairs and other school and community events. Through the AMD Foundation’s support in 2008 and 2009, Science Buddies launched a Video and Computer Games Interest Area on its site aimed at helping students understand and practice what is required to design digital games. Science Buddies’ staff scientists develop project ideas to spark student interest in exploring topics such as human behavior in games, ergonomics, game design and programming and the incorporation of social or educational content in games.
  
  

• Girlstart (Austin, TX): Girlstart is a nonprofit organization created to empower
  
  girls in the subjects of math, science, and technology. AMD funded a summer camp that enabled 40 high school juniors to examine gender issues in gaming and explore the power of video games to effect social change. As a capstone project, Girlstart partnered with Global Kids to create a social awareness event in Teen Second Life, a virtual gathering place for teens ages 13 to 17 all over the world to make friends, play, learn and create. The Girlstart teams identified social issues such as, the history of women in technology; stereotypes of females in popular video games and responsible gaming. The girls then designed an event to raise awareness and inspire action around the issues.
  
  
• Global Kids (New York City, NY): Global Kids seeks to transform urban youth into successful students and community leaders. Through its grant to Global Kids’ Playing for Keeps program, AMD joined The Microsoft Corporation in enabling 20 youth from underserved communities to work with game developers to develop, create and distribute a socially conscious game, Tempest in Crescent City which focuses on citizens’ response to Hurricane Katrina. This game was launched on August 28th, 2008, the 3rd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In 2007, Global Kids participants worked with developers in the Playing for Keeps program to create the game Ayiti: The Cost of Life which allows players to assume the role of impoverished people living in rural Haiti with the goal of managing key health, education and quality of life challenges.
  
  
• Institute for Urban Game Design (Washington DC): IUGD is a nonprofit organization teaching science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills through the hands-on creation of digital games. AMD’s grant enabled 40 McKinley high school students to apply their learning in 3-D modeling, animation and computer programming to develop games focused on the issue of energy usage. Students are learning about and exploring the social issues associated with different types of energy.
  
  
• Science Buddies (Carmel, CA): Science Buddies is a national nonprofit organization based in California's Silicon Valley offering a variety of web-based tools that help K-12 students explore science through research projects often done at science fairs and other school and community events. AMD’s grant is enabling Science Buddies to launch a Video and Computer Games Interest Area on its site aimed at helping students understand and practice what is required to design digital games. AMD volunteers will work with Science Buddies’ staff scientists to develop project ideas to spark student interest in exploring topics such as human behavior in games, ergonomics, game design and programming and the incorporation of social or educational content in games.
  
  
• Games for Change Festival (New York, NY): The AMD Foundation was a sponsor of the Games for Change Festival, which brought together leading non-profit organizations, experts, and game developers to explore the increasing real-world impact of digital games as an agent for social change. The 2008 Festival took place on June 3 -4, at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City.
  
  
• Let the Games Begin - A Toolkit for Making Social Issues Games - The AMD Foundation, in partnership with the John G. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, presented “Let the Games Begin,” a day-long workshop for nonprofit organizations on making social issue games at the 2008 Games for Change Conference. This soup-to-nuts tutorial on the fundamentals of social issue games event kicked off the Games for Change Festival on June 2.
  
  
• The PETLab Game Design and Animation Curriculum - AMD in partnerships with PETLab (a joint project of Games for Change and Parsons The New School for Design) has created a Game Design and Animation Curriculum for young people between the ages of 9 and 13. The curriculum has enjoyed great success with Boys & Girls Clubs members in cities across the country, including Austin, Atlanta, Santa Monica, and Newark. Participating young people have gained skills and experience in systems-based strategies, creative problem-solving, and procedural thinking. The curricular modules are designed as a sequence of “missions” that can be explored in two tracks, one digital and the other analog/physical, so that a variety of youth organizations can host the curriculum, regardless of computer infrastructure. The modular nature of the curriculum also makes it conducive to varying levels of student engagement over different time periods (e.g., one day, one weekend, several months)."
  
  

AMD Changing the Game helps kids enhance their professional and educational skill sets, learn about civics and citizenship, develop a global perspective, and enhance their ability to contribute solutions to the social issues most relevant to their lives.