A national Australian competition designed to get students making videogames will end after its 2026 event, with organisers saying generative AI has made it harder to judge what students created themselves. The decision puts a real educational dilemma on the table: when AI can make a finished game, what should a challenge meant to teach game-making reward?
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
The Australian STEM Videogame Challenge, a free national competition for students, is holding its final event this year after more than a decade. Cathy Zemaitis, head of the Student Learning and Progress division at the Australian Council for Educational Research, told PC Gamer that the decision was driven by the rapid rise of generative AI in game development. She said it had become harder to judge what students made themselves and was moving the programme away from its original purpose.
Zemaitis said organisers have no plans to create an alternative version of the challenge, though ACER is looking for other ways to work with schools and the education sector. She also pointed educators towards the International Mathematical Modelling Challenge.
Why it matters
This is not simply a question of whether students may use AI. If a competition cannot reliably distinguish a student’s own work from a game generated largely by a tool, judging becomes difficult and the original learning goal can get lost. Yet banning AI outright would leave students practising for a world where generative tools are increasingly part of game development.
The organisers’ decision shows how quickly AI can unsettle an established educational format. It also leaves students and teachers without this particular free national route into game-making.
Our read
Closing the competition may be understandable, but it is a costly answer to a problem that deserves a more inventive one. A challenge could assess the process as well as the finished game: students might explain their choices, show how they revised a project, or identify which parts came from AI. None of that makes judging effortless, but “hard to judge” is a design problem, not necessarily the end of the lesson.
What to watch
- Whether ACER develops a replacement programme with schools or education partners.
- How other student competitions set rules for AI-assisted work and assess students’ contributions.
- Whether educators find ways to teach game-making that treat AI as a tool without letting it do the learning.
Discussion spark: Should student game competitions ban generative AI, or redesign judging to reward students’ process and decisions rather than only the finished game?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (10 November 2026, 18:51 UTC)
- Educational game dev program cancelled because students were submitting games made entirely with AI – PC Gamer (10 November 2026, 18:51 UTC)
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