The challenge of finding a game for the classroom can be difficult, particularly when the games you’ve imagined doesn’t exist. And if you wait for a particular challenge or topic to make its way into game form, it might be a while. Educational games and “serious” games haven’t always kept up with the rest of video gaming, in part because there’s no high return. Modern game development tends towards large teams and impressive budgets, and these resources are rarely used on explicitly educational productions. While efforts like the STEM Video Game Challenge provide incentives for new learning games, and commercial titles can often be adapted for the classroom, there’s still more potential than games have yet reached.
But if you have a new concept for playful learning, you can still bring it to life for your classroom. There are two ways to start thinking about making games in the classroom: the first is to build a game yourself, and the second is to engage students in making games as a way to express their own understanding.
You’re probably not a game designer, although there’s a game for that: Gamestar Mechanic can help you “level up” from player to designer. But it’s also important to remember building games rarely happens alone: as with digital humanities projects, games lend themselves to collaboration. If you have a game design program (or even a single course) at your university or a neighboring school, there might be an opportunity to partner your students with them towards creating valuable content-based educational games. Similarly, there may be other faculty who are interested in collaborating on grant-funded projects to build new educational experiences, or collective and expanding projects like Reacting to the Past (which many readers cited as a classroom game system of choice). You might also find collaborators, inspiration and games in progress through communities such as Gameful, a “secret HQ for making world-changing games"--and community manager Nathan Maton has a few things to say about building serious games for education.
There’s also a difference between making a game or asking your students to make a game as an expression of content for pedagogical purposes and making a game in the industry. Even a flawed game can provide an opportunity for learning and discussion. And your students will often bring a wealth of their own experiences with games to the process, offering them a chance to make new connections with your course material.
Ready to try making games? Here are a few tools for getting started.
- Board and card games can be a great first project, particularly for students. Digital games are flashy, but board and card games offer the advantages of structured play with a lower barrier to entry. They can also be good practice for learning the mechanics and structure of games without getting bogged down in programming and logic. We’ve all played some version of classroom jeopardy before, and it remains an example of taking game-like mechanics and applying them to any content--but when content guides the way, board games can transcend these roots.
- Inform 7 is a modern heir to text-based games, and it’s a free development tool that’s perfect for interpreting and building worlds without needing visual elements. Aaron Reed’s Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 is a thorough guide to the system. The Voices of Spoon River IF offers one example of literary instruction through the form, while Nick Montfort’s Book and Volume demonstrates the potential for systematic logic. There’s even the ECG Paper Chase IF for a meta-experience on the origin of gaming and educational technology. (Curveship, a newer interactive narrative platform, is less friendly to non-programmers than Inform 7 but offers some impressive possibilities.)
- GameMaker (with a free lite version) allows for building games on two levels: at the surface is an easy to manipulate, graphical interface for building games. Beneath that, an advanced scripting language allows for the possibility of delving further. The GameMaker’s Apprentice textbook goes step-by-step through making a variety of basic games drawn from arcade genre standbys, many of which could serve as the basis for more creative projects while also offering the tools to build procedural literacy and digital skills.
- GameSalad is a free tool for building simple games. While GameSalad is only available for Macs, it offers a code-free way to create graphical games for both mobile platforms and HTML5. It’s relatively new, and most of the educational games created for it aim at the younger crowd of kid-friendly mobile apps, but it definitely offers the chance for experience with logic and rapid prototyping.
Have you build a game for your classroom, or assigned your students to make a game as part of their learning? Share your experiences and plans in the comments!
