Video Game Design Unit: Student Story-Frames

(image via Gamestar Mechanic Teacher Blog)

I’ve been sharing out about our class work with merging video game design and story-telling, and my reminder to my sixth grade students about the importance of story. In a recent Gamer’s Journal reflection, I asked them to remind me of their game story-frame.

Here are some of the examples, which are a good indication of how my young writer/gamers are thinking of narrative in terms of game design.

The story frame is that a young magician is trying to get revenge on another older magician that has gotten him in trouble and fired his favorite teacher for standing up for him. Your player is his servant and you must make the older magician look bad in return by stealing one of his magical devices, but that won’t be easy. The hardest part of building my game was making sure that it fit the story accurately.

It is called “Lab X: the experiment”. It is about a scientist who is new at Lab X, and is told to see how an experiment ended up. He heads up to the room in which they conduct experiments, to discover that the experiment turned everyone else into monsters. Then he tries to escape with only the help of a few robots to instruct him.

It is about a girl named Amy trying to find her long lost brother. He was taken from her and her family about a year ago. He was taken by evil creatures or the creatures of death. But in the second level you are her brother trying to escape from the creatures.

The story-frame of my game is that Tyson (the character) is trying to save someone he knows Percy from Tartarus. There are 4 levels and Tyson starts at the Empire State Building and has to make it through the Empire State Building, the Underworld, and Tartarus alive. He will face monsters on his way, too.

My story is about a young hero who wakes up in a wonderland after defeating Gregor the Great, (or so he thinks,) A great wizard that needs “sun-gems” for power. Roger G. will guide the hero through the wonderland so they can get the sun-gems to leave and thwart Gregor before it’s too late.

My game is about sprites who are able to fly, and use their abilities on a daily basis. However, the new King has restricted their ability to fly. None of the sprites like this, and the player is chosen to go challenge the king to get back their right to fly.

My video game follows the story of a heroine who finds the courage to go save the princess. The princess has been kidnapped (or I guess you could say princess-napped), by the Evil Oracle, who brings her to a secret chamber within a volcano. He puts her under a mind control, so she listens to everything he says. The heroine first escapes the kingdom, which is under a sort of lockdown. The next step is to venture through the Dark Forest, where she must battle three evil sprites to collect the Keys of the Forest, which allow you to safely leave. Lastly, the heroine must battle the Evil Oracle, who told the princess to jump into the volcano. She defeats him, and must rescue the princess, who will unknowingly attack you, without harming her.

I would like to give you an update on my game I titled “The Treasure Rescue”. My game is about an evil turkey that steals the treasure that is filled with the national history of the Galapagos Island and the queen has asked you to go on a dangerous journey to find and retrieve the treasure.

My video game’s storyline is you get captured by the evil snow Queen and you need to escape before she destroys your whole village with her giant snow monster servant! You have to escape her dungeon and get past her royal guards before it’s too late to save your village!

Peace (in story and game),
Kevin

The Story-Frame Component of the Video Game Design Project

Text Samples: The Queen's Mission

My students no doubt think I am a broken record (if they knew what a record was). Every day, as they are working on their Hero’s Journey Video Game Design Project, I am reminding them: What is your story? How will the player “read” the story by playing your game? Is each level a “chapter”? Where are you putting text into your game?

Text Samples: The Queen's Mission

It’s important that the narrative be part of the game, but they often get wrapped up in the design of the game that they are apt to forget about the story. My daily and constant reminders, and questions as they work, are more about narrative than level design at this point in time.

Text Samples: The Queen's Mission

As always, I am working on my own game as they work, too, as a way to share out my thinking process, my workarounds, my progress and a mentor text for them to play to understand the mix of game and story that this project is all about.

You can play my game, in development process, if you want. I am revising my game as I work, re-publishing new versions as I add new levels/chapters, and talking through my process with my students.

Play The Queen’s Mission (NOTE: does not work well on mobile devices).

Peace (written and read),
Kevin

 

 

The Hour of Code Still Engages

Hour of Code 2017

This is our fourth year (I think) of taking part in the Hour of Code, which nicely falls right within our video game design unit. I know that the whole Hour of Code gets some periodic push-back due to the corporate funding sources behind the week-long celebration of computer science, and that it gets flack from those who think the focused emphasis on programming and coding has gone too far.

Agreed. Somewhat. Still …

Hour of Code 2017

There are some pretty interesting projects available for young people to explore at the Hour of Code site, and during our time working on Hour of Code this week (as a break from our video game design project, another form of programming, right?), many of my students — particularly the girls — were very engaged in the learning and the playing.

So, there’s that. Which is a good thing.

I had some students — but not many — who had done Hour of Code either in other grades (but not at our school, alas) or in technology summer camp programs. At least one had come to our Family Code Night held last Spring. Those few with Hour of Code experience went into Scratch to work on some existing projects, sparking interest around them by other students.

All good.

Peace (every hour, beyond the hour),
Kevin

At Middleweb: Making Maps to Support Literacy

I wrote a bit about maps and writing in the classroom over at Middleweb, where I have a regular column about teaching. The piece dovetailed with work being done all November with CLMOOC on mapping in many forms and varieties.

Check out Using Maps & Mapmaking in Your ELA Classroom

I also shared this list of map-making resources:

Peace (map it out),
Kevin

Graphic Novel Review: Dogs (from Predator to Protector)

The latest in a series of Science Comics coming out of First Second Publishing will surely catch kids’ attention. It’s about dogs. Artist/writer Andy Hirsch’s Dogs: From Predator to Protector is a lively romp through the canine world, told with humor and gusto and jam-packed with science.

In fact, there is so much scientific information — told engagingly and with a nice mix of comic images and writing — that I wonder about the audience of this book. The text complexity pushes it into upper middle school/high school, I would think, as we learn about behavioral science, mapping of genetics, breeding for traits, the history of humans to animals (and vice versa), and more.

It’s all very interesting, but deep and dense. Luckily, the mascot of the book — a dog off chasing his ball as a portal into time — is cute, and engaging, and very dog-like in his mannerisms.

I suspect many kids will pick up the book because of its cover, and hopefully, they will stay to learn more about the complex canines in our midst. This book is another example of how the graphic story/comic format can engage learners and impart informational text, in a fun way.

Peace (woof),
Kevin

 

Annotation Invitation: Critical Literacies and Student Stories

Annotation Event: Critical Literacy

As part of the ongoing Writing Our Civic Futures project, through Educator Innovator and Marginal Syllabus, a crowd annotation of Linda Christensen’s deep article on how she turned her classroom around to focus on the lives of her students is underway.

And you are invited.

The project uses the open sourced Hypothesis tool, which allows for discussions and annotations in the margins of online documents. Linda Christensen is also participating, so you might have a chance to dance in the text with Linda. The article — Critical Literacies and Our Students’ Lives — was first published by NCTE via In the Middle, and Christensen’s views about how to pivot towards authentic stories in times of testing is an important sharing moment.

I’ve been moving some of my annotations of the paper version of her piece to the online piece, via screenshots. But you can add text, images, gifs, videos, sound, and more in Hypothesis, creating a multimedia collage of thoughts and connections.

Critical Lit Margins6

I was fortunate to be invited to take part in a video conference with Linda and some other educators to talk about what she wrote and the nature of public annotation of writing, as sort of a preview for the annotation event. She was very open and insightful, and I most appreciated her thoughts when I asked her about how she was feeling about opening up her words to annotation in the commons. (see her response)

I hope you can join us in the margins …

Peace (in and beyond the classroom),
Kevin

 

Slice of Life: Unexpected Chaos

(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

I don’t know all the details. The entire sixth grade class was outside for a short recess and I was in the office when a call came in over the walkie-talkie about a student falling off the slide, and landing on their head. The nurse rushed by me with a wheelchair.

As the class came in from the outside, I heard murmurs about the incident, with some students telling me that another student had pushed the fallen student off the top of the slide, on purpose.

The next class period in my classroom was chaotic, as the student who fell is a member of that class and all of their friends were worried (I am purposefully writing gender-free here, to protect privacy). Some students got called down midway through class to talk about what happened on the slide to the vice principal, further disrupting the learning.

I did my best to acknowledge the incident in very general terms — expressing concern for the student who had been hurt — without opening up the classroom to accusations. I had the sense that any opening about the incident could easily turn my classroom into a courtroom.

Unfortunately, this particular class needs very little distraction to get off-track – nearly every day requires a command performance to keep the lessons going forward — and I spent the entire hour trying to keep them on task with our reading and our game design project. I can’t say I was all that successful.

The ambulance pulling into the school driveway just outside my window didn’t help. It just made us all more worried and concerned, and for the fallen student’s friends, even more angry. I kept the calm as best as I could.

A note later from the vice principal confirmed some of the incident that students had suggested to me in the hallways, about the push seeming to be intentional (but probably not the severity of the injury). Some things are hard to explain, difficult to understand. The impulsiveness of adolescents is a known and yet surprising part of child development.

I just hope my fallen student is doing OK.

Peace (on the playground),
Kevin

 

Book Review: Everything I Need to Know I Learned in The Twilight Zone

Rod Serling Quote

I understood the gimmick behind this book but I could not resist it. Mark Dawidzkiak’s Everything I Need to Know I Learned In The Twilight Zone is a fabulous read, with references to a myriad of stories that unfolded in Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. I won’t pretend I got all of the references to all of the episodes, but there were enough to jar my memory banks to the crafty stories of Serling’s show.

Broken up into 50 lessons — from Always Keep Your Heart Open to the Magic that Comes Your Way to Don’t Live in the Past to Imagine a Better World to Angels Are All Around You and more —  this book explores the strange terrain of the television show by reminding us of how stories can expose the truth of our lives.

Reading the book had me digging out my old box set of DVDs of The Twilight Zone, to find reference points. It’s pretty amazing how Sterling’s production and his and many other writers’ stories still stand up over the decades. That is probably the result of the stories themselves, and the twists and themes that emerged on the small screen.

Dawidzkiak is a media critic, whose beat has often been television. You can sense the love he has for Sterling’s art, and how these narratives can be grouped around important themes, or lessons that we best learn (or suffer the consequences, as often happens in the twisty ending of the show). Dawidzkiak remind us that Sterling sought to bring to the surface the good of people, yet was never afraid to punish those whose choices damaged the world, those around them, or themselves.

Reading Everything I Need to Know I Learned In The Twilight Zone is sure to draw you back into the Zone. That’s not a bad place to be, as long as your heart is true.

Peace (twists and all),
Kevin

 

The Start of the Journey: Video Game Design Project

 

Writing and Game Design Compared

We’re just starting up our video game design project, with a theme of the Hero’s Journey as the storyframe for video games being designed and then published by my sixth graders. The other day, I gave them a few games from last year’s class (as well as my own mentor game) to play and to write about, from a player perspective.

Storyboarding Video Game DesignThink you can play?

Play The Odyssey of Tara

Right now, students are working on the brainstorming of the storyframe, and how they envision the levels of the game to look like via storyboarding.

Storyboarding Video Game Design

Peace (game on),
Kevin