D.B.G.E.M.
18 student-built bots and 29 arena matches at a summer camp
Developing Boys Into Gainfully Employed Men runs a summer camp for young men in grades 7 through 12. JAB ran the AI STEM sessions across two camp weeks, and students who had never written code shipped working software the same day.
- 18
- bots designed by students
- 29
- arena matches from those designs
- 4
- working games shipped and taken home
- The work
- A camp day is full and the room has every experience level. A coding session has to work for the student who has never typed a line and the one who already builds games.
- What JAB did
- JAB brought the instructor, the lesson plan and its own workshop software: a bot arena, a game build sprint and a facilitator console projected for the whole room.
- What is true now
- 18 bots designed, 29 arena matches, 4 games shipped and taken home, and zero sessions lost to setup.
The room
D.B.G.E.M. is a metro Atlanta nonprofit. Its summer camp pairs leadership, trades and career exploration, and in June 2026 it ran across two weeks at the Chattahoochee Technical College Paulding Campus. JAB was the AI STEM presenter.
What we built
Teams described a battle bot in plain English. The system turned each description into a fighter, balanced to the same budget, so asking for an invincible bot produced a slow machine that overheats. That is the lesson: the description is the reason the bot is fast or fragile.
Teams named themselves SPEEDSTERZ, The Gear Grinders, FACTS and The Garfield Crew, defended their designs in front of the room, and then let the arena decide. In the build sprint, teams shipped browser games with scoring, difficulty and a restart, single files that open on any computer at home.
The real thing
“Because of partners like you, our campers experienced far more than a traditional summer camp. They were immersed in an environment that inspired them to dream bigger, lead with confidence, and begin preparing for successful futures.”
D.B.G.E.M. is named with permission. Facts from JAB workshop records from the June 2026 sessions, as of October 11, 2026.
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