A trio of electronic gaming enthusiasts is playing on kids' interest in video games to help at-risk urban students learn key math and science concepts--and possibly open doors into the lucrative game-design industry for them.

Announced at this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3), the Urban Video Game Academy (UVGA) is a free program that aims to reinforce core curricular subjects through instruction in video-game programming, while infusing greater diversity into the video-gaming industry.

UVGA started teaching its first group of 25 students on June 27 in Baltimore. Similar UVGA programs are set to take off this summer in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.

UVGA is the brainchild of three colleagues with deep roots in the video gaming and media industries, as well as in the communities where the free program will be piloted.

Roderick Woodruff, based in Washington, D.C., is president and co-founder of AAGAMER.com, an online news and information web site developed for African-American video-game enthusiasts. Mario Armstrong is the technology correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) and host of Baltimore NPR affiliate programs "The Digital Spin" and "The Digital Café," as well as a developer for community and business technology programs for the city of Baltimore. Joseph Sulter is the chairman of the Game Design and Development Department at American Intercontinental University in Atlanta and chair of the International Game Developers Association's Diversity Advisory Committee.

Armstrong said the three started the program as much by coincidence as anything else. "We all know each other," he explained. "[UVGA] started with the standard 'let's do lunch' kind of networking protocol. From there, we discovered that Rod's trying to launch a camp, I'm trying to launch a camp, and Joe's trying to do a workshop with the kids."

The colleagues agreed upon the benefits of collaborating, which led to the creation of the nonprofit Digital Arts and Technology Learning Center, which will support the UVGA project and serve as the springboard for the project's expansion, as well as future endeavors.

UVGA comes on the heels of such studies as 2001's "Fair Play: Violence, Gender, and Race in Video Games," by the youth advocacy group Children NOW, which found a marked though arguably predictable lack of diversity in portrayals of women and characters of color in video games.

The study found that white characters were the only human characters in most young children's games. Nearly all of the heroes in the games were white, and female characters accounted for only 16 percent of humans depicted. The study found that half of all female characters were most likely to be portrayed as props or bystanders; 86 percent of all African-American female characters depicted in games were victims of violence; African-American and Latino male characters were typically athletes; and Asian or Pacific Islander characters were portrayed as wrestlers. In addition, it found there were no Latina characters portrayed in any video games as of 2001.