This summer, Hollywood's blockbusters are engaging in a high-stakes format war between cutting-edge digital technology and old-fashioned, photochemical film. Digitally photographed thrillers like The Avengers, Prometheus, and The Amazing Spider-Man will be battling it out with equally epic movies shot on film such as The Dark Knight Rises, Men in Black 3, and Battleship. Indeed, no summer in recent memory boasts so much variety in terms of how films are photographed and exhibited.

Yet with studios looking to trim costs on increasingly expensive "tentpole" movies, traditional celluloid film—easily the more expensive of the two formats—may be on its way out as the cinema's medium of choice. Still, advocates of film continue to make compelling arguments about why theirs is the more enduring medium, even as both sides pull out their biggest guns this summer in an effort to prove definitively the commercial value of their respective formats.

I have a student, a boy, who began the year refusing to write anything. He wasn’t rude. He was just resistant. At most, he would quickly jot down a few sentences and that was it. He was done. He didn’t care about writing nor did he see any value in his words. I learned from his mother that this had been the case for some time. While he is an avid reader, his writing was always a struggle.

Over the course of the year, though, I have been watching him slowly emerge from that shell. It began around December, with our video gaming unit. Here was something he is interested in, and his game as well as the writing components that were part of it were exemplary in many ways. He was pushing himself to write, and to write well, and to connect his writing to something meaningful: the video game he was designing for publication.