Know any game design activities?

I will be sponsoring a Game Design Club at a middle school that I work at. The materials ordered won't be here this week and probably not next week, so what are some cool activities related to game dev or game design that are not on the computer that the kids can do or perhaps good videos to show. Any ideas are welcome!

One thought I had was have the kids try and use Pokemon Go and I will hand them a genre and they try and use the Pokemon Go concept and tweak it to fit different genres like medieval or space then show the Extra Credits they did on the same idea.

Do you have any others I would love to hear them!

 

....making games? Theres no substitution from the real thing

Of course, they should probably start with pen and paper games. In my first year of college, I did a game design course that focused exclusively on design, and we did a lot of fun stuff, like the first major project we did was making a game with a very interesting set of parameters.

We were only allowed to use the following items: 5 x 7 note cards, standard printer paper (there was a limit to how much obviously, I forget what it was), plastic army men, dice, coins, or marbles. No board game/Candyland Clones. Other than that, anything goes. It really forces you to get creative, it was a lot of fun.

I ended coming up with a game called Paper Generals, where you had to use cards that I drew up with generals/historical figures on them, and on the back of the card, it gave you your rules for how you could use sheets of paper to knock over your opponent's army men, and how you could use sheets of paper to protect your own solders, giving you instructions on how to make your weapons and defenses by folding or tearing the sheets of paper. It was messy, but a lot of fun.

Another thing we did was learn how to pitch ideas. Like one day, we were told to get together into groups, and we were given the scenario that we were a small indie company, and though we had made some games before that did OK, but we were running low on cash. We were given a proposition by a Hasbro to make a game for one of their big IPs, and they were willing to give us a big sum of cash to make the game for them. But there were a few companies competing for the bid.

The challenge was in one hour, make up a proposal for the best My Little Pony game you could come up with and pitch it to the class. The professor played the Hasbro person and decided who was the most convincing and feasable idea. I'm not sure how realistic the scenario is, but it definitely helped us think outside the box. We also had to present our ideas for our big final project, that you had to convince the entire class to do, and that was good practice for that presentation.

On the last project, we were allowed to actually use digital stuff. I used Game Maker on our big group final project (my idea won the bid for the final project). Getting them into easy tools to get them started on their own would be a great way to get them into designing their own digital games, like Game Maker and RPG Maker and such. If you are competent with Unity, you could teach them the basics in that as well

Thats just how I learned. And since then, I've seen that that method of teaching continues to apply in real life, as thats how I've learned so much since then, was just by doing it. Theres no substitute, videos will tell you how to do things, but you won't learn anything unless you practice the steps demonstrated in the video yourself.

I believe it was on the first day that the professor told us how to make games. He called it the JFDI philosophy. Given that you are dealing with middle schoolers, you probably won;t be able to quote this one back to your students, but he just yelled out to us what it meant; just f**king do it! And to me, that seems like the only way to learn this stuff.

 

This. Pen and paper it all the way. Once they get the hang of design in the paper space, let them move on.

One possibility is to have them make a board version of their favorite video game. Force them to drill down into the essential mechanics.

 

Oh yeah! That was another fun one we did in class

I took the Assassin's Creed Brotherhood minigame where you send your assassins all over europe to do missions to make them stronger and turned that into a 2 player head to head board game, with assassins vs templars. It was REALLY long, ha ha

Another person somehow did Portal as a board game. I didn't get to play it, but it's interesting that he even tried.

 

Get Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop. It was written exactly for this purpose, and it's packed with exercises and ideas.

 

I like that! Try and have them make a clone of a game, but a paper version. Might look into trying that!

 

I love both of those. Thanks for the long and detailed reply. Might try and combine both and have them make a paper prototype then try and pitch it.

 

I will take a look at that. Thank you!

 

Yeah, making a paper prototype with the intention of turning it into a digital game would be a great way to transition them to digital while still preserving their design skills

I just hope the room you're doing this in has a few white boards for prototyping bigger ideas with teams. For bigger group projects, we spent days on those whiteboards, draw stuff that by the time everyone was done, looked like abstract art, take a picture at the end of class, then get back to it next class.

Man, those were fun times.