Stephen Carter knows a lot about trial and error. The self-taught computer programmer, who mastered visual basic as the foundation for his programming knowledge, took the same approach when he started designing computer games.

Stephen applied the skills he acquired from designing his first game with an idea from a board game he played in high school to create a second game. Auto Jam is a game of strategy where characters are trapped by cars in a junk yard and the player has to rearrange the cars in order to free the characters.

As Stephen explains, he envisioned the idea long before he applied it to a program. But once he initiated the process, the game took about a month to set up. "Mentally, I had just been thinking about it, knowing that I wanted to create a computer game out of this game that I played growing up," Stephen says. "One day I just sat down and laid out the blueprint for it and I added to it from there."

If you ask any good programmer, they will tell you that your application should grow, Stephen says. Taking that advice, he redesigned the characters and their images and trimmed down the size of the game to make it more functional.

Now, a year after he started building the game, Stephen says his programming skills have improved significantly because of the classes he has taken at Clarkson. "I could probably do Auto Jam in a day now," Stephen laughs.

So are there more games to come from Stephen Carter?

"I would like to eventually," Stephen says. "But it is hard to find time with all of the programming I am doing for classes. But making games is a hobby of mine that I am sure I will find time for in the future."