Game Design and Ecosystems - Storyboards

I based the storyboard portion of our project this lesson by Kevin Hodgson posted at the Gamestar Mechanic Teacher portion of the site.

My prior experience has been that students resist planning the games and that's what Mr. Hodgson stated in the lesson as well. I was pleasantly surprised to see the girls in this class enjoying the storyboarding process. As I reported previously, there were no complaints!

To start the lesson, I showed them the examples from lesson above and I gave them one example I made based specifically on the ecosystem games. I posted these directions and had them get to work:

For each level in your game, make a storyboard. Each one must include:

• The level number and title
• Whether it is a top down or platform level
• An explanation of the goal
• The types of enemies that the hero will encounter
• Where the hero starts
• Where points and the goal marker will be
• A picture that maps out the entire level

Here are some examples from our class.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Part 3

First off, thanks go to Katya Hott for posting a link to my project on the Gamestar Mechanic Teacher Blog! I am glad for the exposure and I hope some of our ideas are useful to the many teachers who will see we are doing in this all girls science class.

After reading that blog post I was reminded of some important things:

• I said I would give an update this week on our storyboard assignment. Unfortunately (sort of!) our school was closed today because of snow. It's the first time this winter, so it is a welcome surprise to have a day off...or at least a day where I'm not working at the school. The problem is I only saved the storyboard lesson and pictures on the school network. I will have to post those materials next week.
• The girls started working on their games this week. There has been a lot of excitement at this stage of the project. I was amazed at how well they worked together and were engaged in the process. It is clear that working through the Quest on the Gamestar Mechanic site does a good job of teaching them how to use the application. It was great to see so many of them begin making and playing their first games with such enthusiasm.
• Here is a copy of the Game Creation Checklist that I handed out. The girls are creating their games by referring to that checklist, their storyboards and their completed Game Flow Charts.
• Most of the students are creating their games with the basic resources they earned through the Quest, but a few are working on additional Challenges so they can get certain sprites. I did require them to do the Impact Challenge because I wanted them to have the sign sprite so they can write science facts in their games.
• Most importantly, I realized when I read Katya's post that I haven't mentioned my partner in this venture by name. Andrea Thelen is the middle school science teacher that helped create this project. I asked if I could do something with game design. She suggested the ecosystem tie-in and provided all the background information I needed to develop the project. This is the first long term project I have worked with in the science department in my district, so I have learned a lot from Andrea and I greatly appreciate her willingness to try something new.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Continuing the Project

The game design project is going still well with our group of girls. If you want to look back at my previous posts about this:

• Here's the brief introduction to the project.
• And here's the post on how we started.

We're into our third week and several groups have started their games. That means I'm very behind on posting the steps we've gone through and the documents that I used. I won't catch up entirely with this post, but here are a few more stages.

First, before or after each of the assignments below we encouraged the students to continue their progress through the Quest at Gamestar Mechanic. It has taken them a very long time to work through the five episodes necessary for them to publish games, but the girls are not complaining. Honestly, I don't think I have heard a single student complain about having to play the levels. And it appears the lessons intertwined in the game levels have been effective too. Still, I wish the Quest was a little shorter. Some groups have spent a total of three hours or more on working through the levels.

Students had a tough time filling out the Game Flow Chart (mentioned in the last post) properly, so we had to work with them to be sure they correctly planned the game and had some science facts. Here's a completed sample flow chart that I used to better explain this assignment.

Next, we required them to write an engaging introduction to their game. The assignment resource is here. I plan to send their introductions to the younger students who will be playing the games so that they can vote on the ones that sound most exciting. This is keeping with my initial project focus of effectively presenting information.

These assignments led up to storyboarding, which I will explain that stage in my next post. At this time, though, I want to mention a few other assignments that we worked on.

One of my goals, which I eventually set aside, was to have them compare and contrast the game design process (one good version of which I found explained on this page) with the Scientific Method. The main reason for this was so that the science was not lost in the fun. I liked how dreaming up a fun game is kind of like forming a hypothesis and how testing that game is like running an experiment to test a hypothesis.

I ran this by the teacher and she agreed it was a decent idea. In practice, though, it was just distracting. We started down that path by making a Glog assignment on the Scientific Method. Given the amount of time some girls are spending on the Quest, we decided to abandon that line of thinking for now.

And I also gave them a couple more journals to help them connect with concepts that they are learning in class.

• Journal 2 - Some thoughts about the science and what the students consider to be most important
• Journal 3 - Questions about games of all types and which part they would like to play in the game design process
  

Game Design and Ecosystems - Getting Started

I posted a few days ago about the project I am doing with an all girls science class at the middle school. The teacher named it G.E.M.S., after a similar course she found online. It stands for Girls Engaged in Math and Science. In the project, the girls will use Gamestar Mechanic to create computer games about energy flow in an ecosystem. The fifth grade students in the district will play the games and be assessed to see how well the games teach the concepts.

I have worked with the class for five days now and the project is going very well. Generally I have thought of the game design projects as appealing to the disengaged male students, but the girls have really been enjoying it.

Here is the flow of the project:

1) First the teacher provided a quick review of the concept of energy flow in ecosystems. Students were required to choose an ecosystem and fill out a flow chart that included producers and consumers in that ecosystem.

2) To introduce what Gamestar Mechanic games look like, I had the girls play some sample games from Kevin Hodgson's project. They had to answer a few questions about the games after trying them. The assignment is here: Sample Games Assignment

3) Next, the students had to sign up at Gamestar Mechanic in my classroom and they began the Quest. The site uses the Quest to teach the students the aspects of good game design and also how to use the tools there. I was very curious to see how the girls would take to playing through so many levels. In case they got bored or frustrated with the gaming, I tried to break up the class periods with at least one other assignment so they were not playing continually during any single hour.

It has worked very well so far. No group has completed all the levels yet, but they are not tiring of the process. Many are anxious to get started on their own games, but they need to at least complete the first Quest to be able to publish their games for others to play. (I have a Premium account at Gamestar which provides a second Quest, but most will not need to proceed into that one to get the resources they need.)

4) One assignment that I used during this time is a Game Flow Chart. It expands upon what they did with the ecosystem flow chart, but it also incorporates more facts and the game elements that they discovered in the sample games and in the Quest. That assignment is here: Game Flow Chart Assignment

The plan is to continue some planning and storyboard assignments while they work through the Quest and some necessary Challenges. (The Challenges provide optional levels that allow students to earn additional sprites. Some of those will be necessary for an engaging, educational game.)

One other assignment we used was a journal warm-up assignment. I point this out because it is based on some of James Paul Gee's learning principles from What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. I loved the book and this journal assignment was my first attempt to see if the principles are effective with these girls. I wanted them to consider themselves within the roles of scientist, game designer and teacher.

Journal Assignment 1

Classroom Game Lesson - Critical Thinking and Writing

I dug up a lesson this week that I used to use in my Pre-Calculus classes. The seniors would graduate a few weeks before school was out, so for those remaining juniors I would set them loose on this very popular lesson where I attempted to teach critical thinking using a variety of board and card games. It would last about five class periods.

Here's a PDF of the last version of this assignment that I used. (It was about this time that I left the math classroom to work as the Instructional Technology Coordinator.)

While the students loved these days and we all had fun, I worked each year to improve the focus so that they were objectively thinking about the games and what they were doing. You'll note in the handout above that I continually emphasize thinking, clear communication and analysis of what was going on in the game. I have to admit, though, that I never got very far in that endeavor. Even with the excellent students that ended up in that class, the fun got most of the attention.

This served to alert me to the importance of setting game lessons in context. Now when I introduce a game design lesson (usually involving computer games) I start by downplaying the games and emphasizing the knowledge and skills that we want the students to leave with.

Here are the games that I used in this lesson, with links to their pages on the Boardgame Geek. I'm sure a lot of other games that would be perfect for this lesson have come out since 2008 when I last assigned it, but reading up on these pages will certainly draw your attention to additional options. (Some titles have different names at BGG than the editions I used on the worksheet. They are essentially the same games.)

Deduction

Coda
Clue Card Game
Top Secret Spies

What's That On My Head?

Strategy
Hey! That's My Fish!
Loco
Ingenious
Durch die Wuste (Through the Desert)

Probability
Fill or Bust
Double or Nothing
No Thanks
Last Chance

Party/Social Games
What's It To Ya? (Oh, Really!)
Thingamajig
What Were You Thinking?
Balderdash