Let's play

Contributed by Karen Brennan, July 20, 2009

Game design handout and examples

Original Author: Karen Brennan
Education Level: Preschool and Kindergarten, Elementary School, Middle School, High School, College and University, Professional Development, Other
Content Types: Activity, Handout, Sample Scratch Project
Curricular Areas: Computer Science, Engineering, Language Arts, Mathematics, Music, Science, Social Studies, Teacher Education, Technology, Visual Arts, Other
Keywords: beginner, games, CS4HS, Creative Computing, getting started

Game design provides numerous opportunities to explore a variety of computational concepts and skills. At the Creative Computing workshop last week, we conducted a workshop that focused on designing games with Scratch. After discussing that games have a common structure of goal, rules, outcome (based on Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's definition of a game), we worked in pairs to design our own games. As a starting place, I showed three types of games (a maze game, a collision game, a guessing game) and then distributed a handout.

I've attached the Scratch projects for the games, as well as the handout. The handout has 4 pages: an overview of Scratch blocks that are frequently used in games and a sheet for each game type.