Check out this TED talk from this young man, Lewis Tachau, who presents about gaming, learning, skills and self-regulation as a gamer.
Peace (in the game),
Kevin
Category Archives: Gaming in the Classroom
Sharing Student Work: Pollution Essay with Video Game
Video Games: Friend or Foe
My friend, George Mayo, does amazing video work with his students. This spring, he asked if some of his students could interview me and one of my own students for a piece they were doing around video games and education. So, we hooked up on Skype one day, and his reporters chatted us up about our own video game project. The other week, they finally published the piece, and it is pretty neat (although Skype delayed our voices.) Check it out (and check out the other great videos that George’s kids did, too, at their Watch Out! site).
Video Games: Friends or Enemies from mrmayo on Vimeo.
Our work around video games can be viewed at our site: Gaming4School.
Peace (in the movie),
Kevin
Making Sense of Video Game Stats
One of the many things I like about Gamestar Mechanic is how it guides young game designers to continually improve their games, even after publishing it to online spaces for an audience of gamers. The other day, I shared out my Fueling the Fuel Cell game that I made as a mentor text for my students. Since then, the number of players who have tried the challenge has gone up every day (thank you, if you tried my game. If you want to try it, follow this link into Gamestar to play Fueling the Fuel Cells). But how does a game designer know about the experiences of the players? Well, in a bid to answer that query, Gamestar Mechanic provides you with a handy “stats” page that shows how many people have started the game, how many finished the game, and how many made it the end of each level (if your game has multiple levels).
Here are the stats for my fuel cell game:
You’ll notice that not too many folks got to the end of the game. That’s fine, although ideally, the middle funnel shape (shown in the guide to the left of the page) is what you are aiming for with your game. You don’t want everyone to win (too easy) nor do you want everyone abandoning the game (too hard). You want to find that sweet spot of true gamers sticking with you until the end.
When my students are coming back to revise games, after the first round of sharing, this is a page that I bring them to on their game. It’s funny how they interpret the data, though. Some are quite happy if no one can complete their game, as if it were a competition between them and their audience. Others can’t shift from a person who has spent hours creating a game and know every little square of the layout to imagine themselves as newbies to it, seeing the problems with the game from another angle. All of this is valuable for the iterative revision process of video game design, however.
Peace (in the game),
Kevin
PS — another game I created and share out is Women in Science.
A Video Game Collection: Essay-inspired Media Projects
I played a bunch of my students’ video games yesterday as part of my assessment of their essay projects, which I have been writing about for a few days now (and more to come …) I decided that I would grab screenshots of some of the games made in Gamestar Mechanic and then dump those videos into Animoto, for a quick video collection.
Check it out:
You can also play one of their games:
Peace (in the games),
Kevin
The Fuel Cell Video Game Project
I have a significant number of students working in Gamestar Mechanic to develop the “media component” of an environmental essay project. I have been modeling my own essay with students every day — pulling out paragraphs and making observations about my strategies — as a mentor piece, and I have been doing the same with the media pieces. My own essay is about fuel cell technology. Yesterday, I worked on, and then finished, a short video game about fuel cells that I shared with my students yesterday.
What I pointed out to them is how I used the text of the game (in the form of the introductions, rules, and even text messages within the game itself) to reflect the “stance” of my essay that fuel cells are a good idea and need more investment and research. I’ve really been pushing the ways to marry the media project with the argumentative stance of the essay, so that the two work together to create one single powerful message.
Interested in playing my video game called Fueling the Fuel Cells? Give it a try.
Peace (in the game),
Kevin
Gamestar Mechanic’s Summer Design Program
I shared this opportunity with my students, some of whom really were engaged in our video game design project earlier this year and continue to use Gamestar Mechanic to develop and publish their own games, which is pretty cool. This new summer initiative by the Gamestar Mechanic folks will link up students with professional video game designers, and have them work on developing video games with an eye towards more advanced techniques (you know, I wouldn’t mind doing the camp). There is a cost associated with the summer program, but I wanted my students to at least know about it. You may want to share the idea with some of your gamers, too.
Here is the link to the summer program within Gamestar Mechanic
Peace (in the game),
Kevin
App Review: Sketch Nation Studio (for gaming)
I’ve been intrigued by Apps that provide the tools for the users to create their own video games. Sketch Nation Studio is a free app that does just that. The platform allows you to create and play original games, by using either artwork that you draw right in the app, or artwork that comes off your device, or art that you draw on paper and then take an image and import into the game.
There are several variations of platform-style games, and while the end result is not nearly as sophisticated as some of the apps you might buy for your device, it provides enough creative outlet to feel as if you have, indeed, created your own app game. You can set the style of game, add energy boosts and enemies, adjust gravity, create backgrounds, and more.
And did I mention that the Sketch Nation Studio App is free? I don’t see any advertising on the app, in case you are wondering .
There are also options to publish the game onto the iTunes store (and the company promises to share in the profits from any sale of the game app, so I guess your game funnels through their publishing system). I’m not sure if that would actually work (yet I may give it a try just to see what happens), nor if the game app provides enough variation to actually create a game that would sell, but even sharing a game via iTunes is pretty interesting. And, therefore, I am intrigued by the potential of that opportunity for creating and publishing for my students. And I am now wondering if using this app on our school’s iPods wouldn’t be a neat end-of-year activity to tie into our earlier Game Design Unit.
Hmmm …
Peace (in the app),
Kevin
Kevin
PS — here is a video overview of the app
A Nice Write-up of our Video Game Design Site
One of the curators at the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site did a “review” of our website that was a reflection for a science-based video game design project.
The scaffolded nature of the website reflects the attention that the teacher team paid to the structure of the project itself. Students reflected about the principles of video game design (both good and bad), blogged about the big ideas from their science class that would become the content world of their game (layers of the earth, mountains, volcanoes), and focused on the writing process. The multi-modal design of the site – with student and teacher videos, text, and student work examples – also reflects the teachers’ commitment to the importance of teaching and learning with a range of tools. — Kate Leuschhke Blinn
You can access our Video Game Design site here.
Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin
The STEM Video Game Challenge Results
… so we didn’t win. But that’s OK because the dozen or so students who submitted their science-based video games to the 2012 STEM Video Game Challenge worked hard, and learned a lot about game design, and even when I shared the news of this year’s winners of the competition yesterday, they were still pumped up about their own games.
As they should be. I reminded them yesterday as I relayed the results of the challenge to all of my classes (everyone designed and published video games with a science theme but only a few chose to submit theirs to the competition) how proud I was to be teaching them game design, and how much that experience of designing and publishing, and then submitting, an original video game will be one of those anchor memories of sixth grade. The winning would have been nice, but it was the journey that was most important. They may not realize that now, but I hope they will in a year or two.
They are all anxious to explore the games that did win the Video Challenge, and so I may give them time today after a quiz to do that. They did enjoy the short video that gave an overview of the winners, and they liked the short screenshot video I showed of the winner in their particular category (although they kept comparing that student’s game to their own, and it fell short in their eyes.)
There’s always next year …
Peace (in the game),
Kevin