The Game2Design team at MacICT have been madly designing our new project, ‘Game2Design: play, analyse, build’ where our aim is to move students from playing to building – transforming students from consuming to creating digital content. We believe that the process of understanding and applying the principles of good game design to student created games not only improves literacy, collaboration and higher-order thinking skills, but can lay the foundations for deep learning, innovation and change in 21st century classroom.
The team have designed a new ‘Good Game Design’ workshop which will seek to evaluate innovative applications of game design principles in teaching and learning. This workshop is suitable for any teacher who is interested in engaging their students in designing and building games, but are not quite sure how to go about teaching students the principles of good game design. Perhaps you may already have a piece of software in mind or would like some advice about what options are available for students.
The focus of this one day workshop is on teachers employing a constructivist approach that promotes inquiry learning to achieve curriculum outcomes across most key learning areas and address dimensions from the quality teaching framework. Teachers will gain a fundamental understanding of basic game design principles and how these can be applied when teaching students to build games using any type of game creation software. In collaborative groups, teachers will deconstruct and review games, then design and build a level of a game.
