Every teacher recognizes them: gamers. Students who prefer to game day and night, whether on a Playstation, Xbox or PC. These students often have a big dream: to design their own game one day. In addition, we as an education can also learn a lot from computer games. How is it possible that the players try to pass a level again and again, while they drop out after one attempt at a math problem? These game principles are well explained in a previous article .
Now these game elements are fun in the lesson, but why not let students make their own game? Instead of a PowerPoint presentation or a poster, you can also use a computer game to test the knowledge. And it is also a lot of fun to play the final results with the class. In this article we are going to get started: let students make their own games! (And of course you can participate as a teacher!)
Scratch
The easiest program to create a first game and learn to program is without a doubt Scratch . Scratch is a programming language, made so that even small children can learn to program and make a game. It works via the internet and offers various possibilities. This way you can easily make a kind of Super Mario game, and there are a lot of tutorials on YouTube. Here you will get scratch programming for kids in India.
GameMaker:Studio
game maker gamesAnother program that you can easily get started with to create games is GameMaker: Studio . This program needs to be installed, but then offers more possibilities to make a game than Scratch. This allows the games to be designed in a much more professional manner, which, however, requires more from the students. This is still useful for the lower classes, but especially in the higher classes, students will like to use this.
unity
Only interesting for people who have a lot of time and want to bite into making a game: Unity. This is used for making professional games, where you have a lot of possibilities. It is therefore too complicated to use in a 'normal' lesson, but for students who really want to make their work of designing games, this is the best option. There are also many different tutorials for this on YouTube. The program is free to use for home and education use, but you will need some programming as well as design knowledge.
Games by the languages: Twine
A fun other way of making games is a very old-fashioned one: no images, just text. Twine is a website to create stories where you have a choice. For example, you can have Dutch or English students write a story, in which they always have to make a choice. They work this out in Twine , eventually having their own text-based game. Fun to do, because you are always busy with 'what if?', but especially because it motivates students to write stories!
