Video games designed by students on the Upper West Side

NEW YORK (WABC) -- Elementary school kids on the Upper West Side enjoyed an unusual treat in the classroom recently.

"There are a lot of games in this room and you will get to play a lot of them," teacher Al Doyle announced.

So they played. The games were designed by their older fellow students at Manhattan's Dwight School.

"They're really fun. Some of them are really hard, though," student Luke Daly said.

Student designer Alexander Khazaneh watched as other students tried out his game.

"(They're) a lot better than me. They've actually made it farther than I ever made it," he said.

Digital media teacher Al Doyle created the video game design course for his high school students.

"They've watched the technology grow and change as they grew up and changed, so every time they level-up in understanding, the game design world catches up to their understanding," Doyle said.

One student created game called Sandbox and the idea is to get a little character to a designated spot on the game screen. Obviously, students are going to be better at this than yours truly, but the purpose of the Dwight School program is to give students the tools they need to put their imaginations to good use.

The Dwight program has drawn professional game developers like Errol King, whose company Hidden Level Games has a design program called Beta The Game.

"You can create your own games, you can share them with your friends, you can play games that other kids have made, but there are also puzzles in the game that expose parts of the coding language that we created to allow you to learn more about how to create games," King said.

"For this generation, video games are rock and roll," Doyle said.

Game design is expected to become part of even more technology courses at schools.