MOSES LAKE — Students from Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center (CB Tech) finished ninth in national competition at the annual FBLA National Leadership Conference.

The team of Clayton Latimer and Quinten Sand placed in the top 10 in Computer Video Game Programming. Fellow CB Tech student Josh Armstrong also competed at nationals, qualifying by finishing fifth in state competition earlier in the spring.

The CB Tech team was among 90 competitors at the national convention, held in Atlanta in late June. “To be able to compete at the national level demonstrates the phenomenal skills and talents of these students,” wrote Terri Pixlee, CB Tech chapter advisor and Digipen-AP/computer science instructor. The skills learned can be applied in many jobs, she added.

The CB Tech teams build their games from the ground up, “the coding, the graphics and sound,” Armstrong said in an earlier interview. Each game has to meet minimum requirements; each has to have three levels, give the players at least two chances to win, and provide a way to definitely win or lose. After that it’s up to the game builders. “They give you a lot of creative freedom,” Armstrong said.

Competitors have their choice of role-playing, story-based and platform games, Armstrong said. (Those are among the basic game platforms, for the non-gamers out there.) Role-playing and story-based games are what they sound like, and platform games involve characters jumping from one level to another.

Each team put in at least 40 hours, not including class time, into their games, Armstrong said, and some teams worked more hours than that. Competitors stick with the same game as they advance from regionals to state to nationals, but they are allowed to revise and refine their games along the way, said Pixlee.

The annual FBLA leadership conference attracted more than 12,000 high school students from around the country, Pixlee wrote. The convention featured competitions in about 65 business and business-related categories, she said. The schedule also includes workshops, with subjects including FBLA activities, preparing for college and career advice. There’s an exhibit hall and sessions for all attendees, with motivational speakers and other activities.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at [email protected].