Day 3 – DU – Teacher Game Institute

Morning Sessions – Programming and Pixels

Started out the morning in Programming. Today, I made my ladybug, move around the world, getting the height and width of the world as the boundaries. There wasn’t a lot more in this session today, we were waiting on other teachers to get the programming done.

Pixels – What a cool session this was today! Our human model was back. We all had huge Wacom tablets, and we had to draw our model, using the Wacom. We used Inkscape as the tool. I don’t think it would be possible to purchase the large tablets used here today, however the smaller tablets are affordable. KW the model held 4 positions for five minutes each. He was simulating a forward walk. Here’s a copy of my work, not too bad for a first attempt. Again, I think this is something I could do in my classroom, if I’m back at GM. Otherwise, I want to find a way to incorporate this into a possible online course for teachers in Jeffco. I had to be a little more coordinated to do this work today, as the computer faced away from the model.

Afternoon Sessions – Pedagogy & Play

In our Pedagogy sessions we’ve been discussing the book “How Computer Games Help Children Learn“, by David Williamson Shaffer. We’ve now discussed through chapter 3. It has been a fairly easy read, and I think a good read. Today in this session we were also asked to set up and post our first blog for the workshop. This was done by copying and pasting a long list of personal inventory items to our blog, and then answering them. We were given the option of making this blog post private, this means that only myself and the research team at DU will be able to read it.

In our Play session we “Play Tested” our games from the previous afternoon. My game “Ninja Barnyard” had a few adjustments to the rules. Seems I needed to be clear, on what skip turn meant – was it this turn or the next turn. The game could also have been better if I had taken the time to put some hazards on the spaces on the board. I had thought about this, but ran out of time, and didn’t do it as homework! At the end of the day we were given the next task/game development round. We were given the choice of a 1″ sq grid or a 1/2″ sq grid. We were given a die, and some glass and plastic tokens. We were told we didn’t have to use the tokens or we could use others. The constraint was this had to be a single-player game.

I first thought I would use the larger grid, as I would have few squares to deal with. I also struggled during this time, I didn’t pick up on the point that this game might be written/designed as a board game but would probably be taken to the computer. I thought about this as homework. I’ve got an idea in the works….having just returned from Switzerland, I think mine will be a Chocolate-Cheese game. I’ll have a map of Switzerland as the game board. Cows will appear at random cities, and remain there for a period of time, the player (I have not determined the sprite for the player) will need to make it to the cow before it disappears. The cow will randomly give the player a Chocolate or a Cheese….the goal will be to collect a certain number of chocolates in period of time. I think I could also put in a hazard…occasionally the cow could take away a chocolate.

To be continued after Day 4.