Gaming Fun!

Today was part 3 of our GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) coding/gaming session and it was the day of design and test. We started off by discussing what an objective is and the students came up with a great set of ideas -

1. an aim
2. a goal
3. an outcome
4. a mission

We then talked about what would make someone want to play a game that we created - we discussed audience and purpose, reasons why different people play games and what they expect from a game. The students shared some amazing ideas!

http://gategaming.wikispaces.com/

Why do people play games online? (responses from students)

• entertainment
• fun
• the challenge
• to try something different
• to get away from 'real life'

The next part of the challenge was to come up with an objective for a game and then get creating! They worked in pairs so that there was collaboration on the game. The students negotiated their ideas and made decisions together. A huge part of the process was to test and then re-plan if their game had issues. They had to test, re-think, re-design, re-test and follow this process over and over again until the game was at a level where someone could achieve their objective but still be challenged.

The students then took a photo of themselves and put it onto our wiki. They added a link to their own page where their ideas were then typed. Then it was time to save and embed their game onto the page. Fortunately I have 3 tech-sperts from my own class who are with me, so they shared the teaching load! 

All in all, a really successful session and plenty for them to work on next time!

Oh, and a HUGE plus was the fact that 8 of the 13 students had been back on sploder.com in between sessions and have been creating their own games independent of me - yay!