Next week I'm going to teach a summer camp about game development to middle-and-high-school age students. It's going to last for the whole week, and they'll hopefully be able to walk away with a game that they've designed, made art for, and coded all on their own.
It's been a bumpy ride, and there have been two waves of teachers who have had to bail on the project, but this last week Chris Rawson and I met together to put together a curriculum using Colleen Macklin's curriculum from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City.
The course that we're teaching focuses more on creating mobile games than it does making games that impact our environment and surroundings. While I firmly believe that games can have a significant positive impact on the way people behave and act, we didn't end up using many of the green-oriented teaching points of Colleen's curriculum. This was partly due to the course content, but mostly due to learning about this ready-made curriculum too late in our class design process. For those who are interested, the Activate curriculum can be found here.
Our course focuses on three specific things: design, teamwork, and coding. The coding aspect of the course will be done in Gamemaker: Studio, and while this is far from even the most liberal definition of coding, it will likely be the first exposure to any sort of code for the majority of the students attending. Most important, Gamemaker is a product that the students can install at home for free after the course.
For the design aspect, we plan on borrowing heavily from the Design I course here at the University of Utah's EAE masters program. Not only was the class the most fun I've had in a classroom, but it also taught many of the principles that I now use on a daily basis. Things like brainstorming methods, paper prototyping, or refinement and playtesting methods are some of the things that we're going to use during the camp.
About halfway through the week, we'll break the 21 kids attending into 7 groups of three, and have them each design a forced side scroller in gamemaker. We're really excited to see what unique things the kids come up with, and for the chance to teach some of the principles that have helped us out while making our own games.
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