Posted by Brian on April 1, 2010 under games design | 
I was lucky enough to attend the Game Based Learning 10 conference at the Brewery in London and was inspired by so many wonderful speakers and met a number of fellow twitterers in real life. I was down there as part of the Consolarium from Learning and Teaching Scotland, and along with Derek Robertson, Ollie Bray and Brian McLaren.
I gave a short presentation on the work Charlie Love and I are doing in the Consolarium in relation to Scottish education and Games Design. Here are the slides from that presentation.
Your feedback is appreciated!
Posted by Brian on January 19, 2010 under games design |
Very Quick Post!
Just discovered that Scratch has the ability to handle text! I mat be a little behind the times on this one, but what a great potential this has to engage and motivate pupils studying Standard Grade and / or Int 2 Computing. Using a combination of the ask and answer blocks in sensing and appropriate variables, I’m positive pupils would be able to carry out the majority of coursework tasks in this freindly environment.
I have always enjoyed using Scratch in the classroom when we begin to teach programming, but the pupils were often put off when we moved from Scratch to the Xcode environment – and who can blame them?
I just recorded a very quick, not quite up to Avatar standards, screen cast to show how Scratch can take in keyboard input and process it in a very Standard Grade Computing way. 
Posted by Brian on January 13, 2010 under games design |
To begin with, take a few seconds to look at the silouttes below.
Recognise any of them? Of course you do – they are the central characters in some very successful computer games.
I spent some time earlier this week with David from Denki, discussing the process of games design and we got onto the topic of characters in computer games. We talked about how important the lead character in a game is and how it relates to the success of game.
When we think about ‘character’ we often think about the characters personality, characteristics and their personal history/background. In the context of creating a computer game in school, it seems like the ideal opportunity to investigate character in an English class. After discussion and writing a charcters background, they should be able to use it to influence how the character should look. Which brings me on to my main point.
The look of a character should reflect their persona, however, the character itself should be easily idenifyable. Hence the silouettes at the top of the post. When creating an easily recognisible character, you are possibly creating a worldwide marketing tool. How many lunchboxes, wallpapers, mugs, birthday cakes, hats, trainers etc are branded with an iconic computer game character? There is a great post by Aldric Chan here that discusses the importance of character further.
Just off the top of my head, I see great potential for embedding game design, in particular, character design into the Curriculum for Excellence eg…
- Write characters in English
- Explore their characters further in Drama
- Create distinctive character designs in Art, even model using clay?
- Use tools like Scratch to build thir own games
- Use their characters in other areas of the curriculum eg
- Create character objects in CDT like keyrings
- Create caps/tshirt etc HE
- Advertise and market their games in Business Studies
I am really keen to expore the area of characters in computer games further and will be working on a some resources for this at the Consolarium.
It would be great to hear from anyone who has used this idea in their school or any ideas people have about it.
