Game Design Workshops

2013 seems to be the year of game design workshops:

In January I talked to students at Norwich University of Arts about game design processes and how we develop games at Robot Riot.

In May I ran a workshop at Digital Shoreditch focussing on the question of how to get students coding.

That got me invited to The Big Bang London fair where I ran two game design workshops. In this format I used Scratch to develop a fully functional game prototype within 20 minutes. Although the game was incredibly simple it was perfect to give an overview of how game design processes and game development works – and what makes games fun.

I will also run similar game design workshops at the Digital Summer Camp in London.

 

 

 

 

Game-based-learning workshop at Digital Shoreditch 2013

Just two days until I will host a workshop about game based learning at this year’s Digital Shoreditch Festival. During the workshop I want to explore ways of how any game can be used to get students interested in topics like software development, technology, science, maths and arts.

My approach to game-based-learning is not about playing serious games or “edutainment” games. Instead I think that ANY game can be used as a tool for teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering, math)

Learning by playing games

The purpose of playing games is to learn. By playing a game we train various skills. Games like “Civilization” teach a lot about decision making and how to balance complex systems – and by doing this players learn interesting historic facts within a meaningful context.

Being a guild member or leader in World of Warcraft will teach you a lot about management and leadership skills and effective team work.

Learning by deconstructing games

Although it might be controversial whether or not playing computer games make people better in performing tasks in real-life, once you start to reverse design a game and to break it down into its components game-based-learning enters a whole new dimension.

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Gamified curriculum for computer science classes

UPDATE: I will give a talk about how to get students coding at the Digital Shoreditch 2013 festival.

Inspired by Ian Livingstone’s campaign to change the way computer science is taught in schools, I dreamed up my own little curriculum to get kids motivated about coding and software development. It’s pretty straight forward:

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Metrics dashboard using Google Sheets

At Robot Riot we needed a cheap and easy to setup metrics dashboard to access, visualize and share data generated by our first free-to-play browser game “The Big Catch“. Business analytics tools like Kontagent were way too expensive and overpowered for what we needed in the beginning. On the other hand, developing our own tool including a custom made web front-end was also not an option because of limited coding resources. So we went for a solution with an unbeatable price tag: Google Spreadsheets. In this article I want to share some of our learnings and also explain some basic metrics we track in our dashboard.

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Machinations: First steps

Update: This blog post has been featured on Gamasutra

Thanks to a recent feature on Gamasutra by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans and their book Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design (Voices That Matter) I discovered the fascinating world of Machinations diagrams. This tool really blew my mind because it provides game designers with a powerful new weapon of choice for analysing, prototyping, communicating and testing game mechanics without having to write a single line of code. That’s great because I am not a coder. Even better: I many cases I do not need a coder anymore for a first game mechanic prototype.

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