Video game design for middle-schoolers?

May 16, 2007 1:58 PM

My middle-school students are interested in video game design. What classroom projects can we do?

Many of my 7th-grade students (primarily the boys) have got in their heads the desire to make video games when they grow up.

I would like to give them a taste of what this would actually be like so that they can better understand the skills that go into creating a video game - storytelling, programming, art design, etc. I am hoping this will motivate them in general. Also it might be a nice way to pass a few days in class.

What online resources or other resources can I show them that either overview the game-design process or let them design their own games? How else can I teach them about video game design?

I have two computers in my classroom, and a laptop that I can, in theory, hook up to an LCD projector, although securing this is logistically tricky and so should have high payoff.

posted by mai to education (11 comments total)

There are a few easy-to-use "game maker" type programs out there, RPG Maker coming to mind as one that middle-school aged kids could learn to use with decent results. There's also Klik & Play, which is freeware now(I think), and allows you to make some semi-decent games; I learned to use it when I was around 10 years old, so I'm sure middle school students could learn it.
posted by pravit at 2:08 PM on May 16, 2007

also, previously
posted by pravit at 2:09 PM on May 16, 2007

Of course, if you want to give them a taste of what it would ACTUALLY be like, throw some C programming books at them and have them spend many a sleepless night poring over code.
posted by pravit at 2:13 PM on May 16, 2007

If software design isn't your emphasis, try Scratch, from the MIT Media lab. The software permits visual programming, using function blocks not unlike Lego Mindstorms. That's no accident-- Mindstorms was derived from an MIT project. Scratch allows students to design simple interactive content, ranging from basic animation to more involved applications such as games. Here's an example game made with scratch: Assault.
posted by nilihm at 2:22 PM on May 16, 2007

As a logistics thing, i think it would be advantageous to break the kids down into 'Teams,' just like real video game making companies. Make a design team, a programming team, a story team, etc. Have everyone in the class make one big game!

Alternatively, make small teams that are each designing a game, with one person in each role.
posted by The Esteemed Doctor Bunsen Honeydew at 2:25 PM on May 16, 2007

I just want to add that even "simple" game design solutions such as Blitz3D require moderate programming knowledge. The time required to debug such proprietary crap is, well, less moderate.
posted by nilihm at 2:28 PM on May 16, 2007

Turning a simple narrative into a storyboard and hence into a "multimedia animation" might be interesting. It involves a combination of technical, storytelling and narrative skills.

On the games programming course I took this was one of the first exercises. We were read about 6 basic sentences that described each "frame" in a short story ("A sunny day", "Everybody heads to the beach", "Including the sharks" etc). From these we had to produce visuals and sounds and put them together with animation. We were using Adobe Director - but you could accomplish something even in Powerpoint. Without getting into any actual code you can look at different ways of telling a story, dealing with sound, etc.

Games programming can be a great way of learning maths too. For example Pythagoras' theorem can be made very relevant as a means of deciding if a missile has hit a space invader.
posted by rongorongo at 3:04 PM on May 16, 2007

Joe Holt, a former colleague of mine is teaching computer science courses at Bennington College. Recently, they did a class revolving around Robotron. Joe and I disassembled the ROMs from the machine and commented a fair amount of the code. It's probably beyond most 7th graders, but give it a look. After all, I was writing video games in7th grade in assembly language.
posted by plinth at 7:04 PM on May 16, 2007

I think everyone’s suggestions here are great, but I’m concerned that if you try to make an actual working game on the computer with 7th-graders, the sizable technical hurdles in your path will lead to some frustration. That’s not to say that if you have coding skills you couldn’t put together a game based on ideas and input from the class – but it probably wouldn’t involve the kids in the direct and sustained way that you might want.

There’s a new trend in game development education for ‘paper prototyping’ before the implementation phase of a videogame project, driven in part by the ideas of my friend Tracy Fullerton and game educators like her. In ‘Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games’, a book that Tracy wrote with her co-authors Chris Swain and Steven Hoffman (I won’t link to Amazon for fear of violating a Metafilter rule, but you should be able to find it easily, hopefully in your local library too), they go into really good detail about smart ways to work up the fundamentals of an idea for a videogame by first creating it as a board game, a card game, a toy or even just some drawings and writing.

I think that this is a great method for students and game professionals alike, since you don’t get as distracted by the specifics of the technical implementation, and you can make large changes to the fundamentals of the game design without having to re-do lots of time-consuming nit-picky work. It’s amazing how much of the abstract structure of a game (which is the real meat-and-potatoes of game design, anyway!) you can get worked out by conducting these kinds of thought experiments with the help of some physical props and a bunch of nifty ideas!

It occurred to me that this might be your best approach with your class, and that they’d jump all over the chance to bust out the cardboard and pens to make Mario Chutes-and-Ladders with green pipes and some special rules about red and white-spotted man-eating plants, or Special Edition Halo Snap! And in the meantime, you could switch out the graphics for a simple Pac-Man shareware game that you find online with images that the class suggests – maybe the pictures of the students for the ghosts and you as Pac-Man?! ;-)

Anyway, best wishes, and good luck!

- Rich.
posted by rich_lem at 8:47 PM on May 16, 2007

I take from your post that you don’t actually expect them to turn out a finished product at the end of the few days. There are two aspects of the process (when boiled down) – the technical side – basically the programming, and the art development side. As I’m sure you don’t want to have them coding for days, you can have them go through the visual creation of the game. Lots of fun concept development stuff. As a group, they have to decide what format the game will take – FPS (first person shooter), platform game, RPG (role playing game), racing, puzzle, etc. What is the expected final product – an online Flash game, or something bigger for the Xbox? The possibilities are endless.

Many things that would be fun to work on – what is the story, what is the goal of the game, storyboarding, developing the visual style, the color palette, etc. Who are the characters and what do they look like? What does the environment look like? I gave a workshop to kids (ages 7-11) where they had to create a character, model it in sculpey, and then had to demonstrate physically how the creature walked, talked, etc.

This could be a great collaborative project for kids – good luck!
posted by JimBobNoPants at 5:59 AM on May 17, 2007

I have to second Rich. If you are qualified to teach them programming and thats what they want to learn then great. If you want to explore game design then pen and paper, board or other real world gaming methods are probably easier to create modify and play. The skills are still directly applicable to videogame design. We use a simple board game design test at my studio for applicants to game design positions. Just as you don't need photoshop to teach painting you don't need a computer to teach game design.

The test you might find useful and it works as follows. A pre made board is provided on a single sheet of paper This can be a simple grid, a path or whatever. To this is added a number of dice and less than one dollar of change. The applicant then creates a rules sheet to turn these things in to a game. We also allow x number of squares on the board to be modified or removed. You would be amazed how many types of play can be explored with such limited means.
posted by subtle_squid at 8:09 AM on May 17, 2007