bill kerr: design and build your own game

I have asked my Year 11's to design and build their own game, using Game Maker.

I have asked them to do an educational game.

Your theme can be school education like maths, history, English etc. or out of school education like netball rules, football rules, the road rules, etc. Your game has to be designed to teach someone else (eg. a Year 8 student) something. You decide what that something is

My reason for this was to try to put them in a situation where they are not building a clone of a game they know, to try to encourage a bit of creativity in design. I'm looking out for other better ideas to improve my course design in this respect. How to facilitate creative design?

Maybe I should have asked for a "social impact" game (entertaining games with non-entertainment goals, aka serious games)?

Their game must have a real audience.

As you go along building your game, as part of the evaluation you are expected to get at least one person from outside of the class to play your game and then to fill out an evaluation sheet which rates your game for both learning and interest. So be clear about what you are teaching and who your target learning person is

Having a real target, which can be just one person, can make a huge difference I think, in getting down to the nitty gritty of designing something to teach someone, not just something in the abstract

They are allowed to work in teams

You are allowed to work in a team of two three or four, or as an individual. If you are in a team make sure that each member has clearly defined tasks so that everyone can keep busy. Game Maker does allow for merging of games so it is possible for team members to work on different aspects of building the game simultaneously

So I have finally bitten the bullet on teamwork. Everyone agrees that it's very important but hard to assess.

I have nine groups, you can see visit their blogs via my blogroll on my gamedesign11 class blog. The blogs which start with 02_ are currently active. (the ones underneath are from Term one)

Writing will continue.

Initially I have said blogging, with an encouragement for group blogs. But now I am thinking that wikis are the natural way to go for group work. So I need to research that a bit more.

I have told my student to answer these questions before anything else: