This blog hop topic of ‘design’ could not have come at a better time. Students and I are in the midst of designing a game called ‘Peela’ or ‘The Yellow Bug’ game in Scratch (click to try it). This project serves as an example, challenge and provocation for students. There are so many decisions that go into designing a fun game: the user interface, the goal(s) of the game, how does the game require player skill, difficulty-based levels, balancing success and failure in user attempts to seek a high score, sense of fun and excitement, appealing graphics, sounds, music, rewards, and so on!
I think game design is an outstanding opportunity for students to engage in and be engaged by a spiraling cycle of design / critical-creative thinking process. I fully subscribe to the ‘Kindergarten learning approach’ espoused by Mitch Resnick (concisely outlined in his 2007 paper).
To me, game design affords students the opportunity to engage in a goal-directed project that is fun but hard, invites feedback and collaboration, involves continuous problem solving, and embraces a highly creative process. The learning is rewarding and brimming over with the development of quality knowledge building and skill development. Scratch is an ideal programming environment because it has been designed from the start to support a spiraling design thinking process while remaining very accessible and functional to young children.
This post is one of many in the April 2016 #peel21st blog hop. Check out the other posts:
- Global Day of Design – Amit Mehrotra
- My Design Moment – Tina Zita
- TBA – Jason Richea
Making things... Learning Things 