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Gamestar Mechanic Teaches Kids to Write Their Own Computer Games (Video)
In this video, Brian Alspach tells you how Gamestar Mechanic helps turn kids from game players into game authors, which helps them learn a lot about programming and how computers work in easy steps while having a good time. If you're a parent, you'll especially want to read this page on their site, which will help reassure you that these folks know what they're doing, and might even (hint hint) give you the idea of suggesting that your local school should subscribe to Gamestar Mechanic, which several thousand schools already do. The price varies between free and $6 per month, which is a great deal for something that can engage children for many hours every day -- and just might keep a parent or grandparent interested, too.
You're on a site that mainly talks about blinkie devices that cost money. Your daily life must be hell.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Scratch is a development environment that not only is easy to learn, but is free as in beer and speech (as it is open source under the MIT license and CC-by-SA for most documentation and source code). There are also several variants that have been done by people other than MIT that are interesting as well, as it has been around for many years.
While this may be a useful tool, shilling for some group trying to make a quick buck doesn't seem right.
BTW, I agree with people complaining that Slashdot seems to be putting advertisements into the stories themselves. This isn't right and it does diminish what quality is left in the website.
So how does this compare to Game Maker, or Stencyl or any of the other items like it? That's not to say it's a bad product, but does it have anything that makes it stand out from the crowd?
Yeah, they could pay you $6 per student a month. Or they could just download Alice (which is much better and teaches actual OOP) for free.
But thank you for your Slashvertisement.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
seriously ... it's so obvious and this has been happening way too often recently. For years they were the infamous networkworld, inforworld, shitworld and myassworld and now this ...
It makes me really think when I'll have something news worthy what are really the odds of getting truly slashdoted by real people like me ...
I'll probably stick to google news from now on.
If you're anonymous then how will we recognize you? *scratches head*
I can't count the number of these Gamebuilding toolkits I've seen over the years. They all have ultimately been lacking, limiting you to a very narrow type of game and had bad scripting languages as their backbones.
After reading this...just wondering.
Can't say you'd miss much from the video this time around, other than that it becomes clear that it is a relatively simple 2D tile-based environment (at least, that which is shown).
Title: Gamestar Mechanics Teaches Kids to Make Video Games
Description: "Level up" from player to designer
[00:00] <TITLE>
The Shashdot logo with "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" zooms out from the top-right to the bottom-left corner.
A view of the interviewee, Brian Alspach, fades in. He is standing in front of a booth backdrop that reads "... just play games when you can make them?" and "...me Generation" and "...th game design studios"
[00:01] Brian>
I'm Brian Alspach I'm the Executive Vice President at E-Line Media, makers of Gamestar Mechanic.
[00:06] Brian>
At E-Line we like to make educational games, games that connect things that kids are really interested in [...]
[00:12] <TITLE>
A view of a few children behind laptops.
[00:12] Brian>
and passionate about with real learning.
[00:14] Brian>
So in Gamestar you start out playing a fun game where you're learning to design and make games.
[00:20] <TITLE>
Back to the view of Brian talking in front of the booth backdrop.
[00:20] Brian>
But then you get a chance to actually make games of your own, and really reinforce critical thinking skills, systems thinking skills, design literacies.
So really excited about doing something like that where we take what kids really like to do and connect it with what they can do.
[00:33] <TITLE>
The view changes to Brian sitting behind a laptop on a desk with a view of the laptop's screen.
[00:33] Brian>
It's really designed for kids age 8 to 14 as their first experience in game design.
[00:38] Brian>
We're gonna go ahead and get started.
I'm gonna log into my account, I'll show you guys a few things.
[00:43] Brian>
Most kids in games start out in our Quest.
[00:46] <TITLE>
The view changes to a screen capture of the Gamestar Mechanic website showing the Quest.
[00:46] Brian>
The Quest is an adventure game story where you are playing the kind of game you'll eventually be able to make.
You play through this fun adventure game, and as you're doing it, you're learning the principles of game design.
[01:00] <TITLE>
The view changes back to Brian sitting behind the laptop.
[01:00] Brian>
You're also earning all of the tools and the assets you'll eventually be able to use when you make your own games.
[01:06] Brian>
We start you off playing the kind of games you'll make and then eventually we'll put you in missions - and this is the very first level you're seeing here - we're sort of teaching you how to move around, but you're also learning about how the enemies, the avatars, the goals, having locks and keys here as a first goal and trying to reach the end of the game as a second goal.
How all of that works together to make a vido game system that's fun and challenging for a player.
[01:31] Brian>
So as you play through these games and you're learning, you're also earning all of those avatars and characters and blocks you'll be able to use in your game.
At any time you can switch over to the design experience in your workshop and make your own game.
It's all drag-and-drop parameterized-based design.
[01:49] Brian>
So I'm gonna make a really simple game right now.
I'm gonna start by adding an avatar - that'll be the guy I'll control - and every game needs to have a goal in it, so I'm gonna add a goal block.
[02:00] <TITLE>
The view zooms in on the laptop screen
[02:00] Brian>
Then I'm just gonna throw a few more blocks in here just so we have something else going on in our game environment.
Just like that, I have a really simple game.
It's not a very good game, but it's simple - I've got my Avatar over to his goal block.
Now that
You mean you didn't find the video informative? I just learned a new definition of the word 'sustainable': to use up every available resource in 45 seconds, instead of the usual 20.
For the iPad, programming in Lua, $10 on the app store.
Or they could just download Alice (which is much better
Tell me more
and teaches actual OOP)
I thought you said it was better?
Required reading for internet skeptics
Instead of the monthly armchair conjecture how about some real data? Yes, many of us have played with some tool and found it more of less usable or interesting resulting the obligatory "you should use X because I did too or at least somebody told me that it is cool" but who has actually run some large scale study with thousands of students to see:
1) if they can learn game design
2) what they learn and if what they learn transfers in any way to topics of relevance to schools, e.g., STEM
3) if teachers in a wide range of environments from inner city schools to Native American communities can actually teach it
Short answer: WE HAVE and as far as I can tell (feel free to contradict me) NOBODY ELSE. The study includes levels of motivation, breakdown by gender and ethnicity, computational thinking pattern analysis of the game and simulations produced, exploration of transfer between game design and STEM. And, perhaps most importantly, most of the schools participating (all over the USA) tried it with non self selecting students. In other words, not the geeky Friday afternoon computer club boys. ALL the kids. See some results here:
http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/wiki/Publications
Seeing the word "sustainable" these days is not interesting. In fact, it's almost to be expected.
Gamestar guy here.. we've found a bunch of studies on gaming and game design and its correlation to STEM skills and higher order thinking skill development. In fact, Gamestar Mechanic began with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to explore whether a game could teach game design concepts and help kids acquire critical and systems thinking skills. On our site, we have available for download two PHD dissertations written about Gamestar and how skills learned in game design transfer into positive life and academic skills.
http://cdn.gamestarmechanic.com/1.24b/pdfs/Games_PhD_Gamestar.pdf
and
http://cdn.gamestarmechanic.com/1.24b/pdfs/Torres_PhD_Gamestar.pdf
Looks like nice work but these were not large scale studies by any stretch of the imagination. Moreover, at least according to one of these documents, the gamestar aim is not to teach programming per se but to teach design. That is completely OK, but it also suggests a very different investigation of transfer. Can I design a game about ecologies and will I learn something about ecology in the process? Fundamentally, this sounds mostly like a constructivist model of pedagogy which does make a lot of sense to me. We are more interested in the far transfer of programming concepts, or more precisely, computational thinking skills that get acquired in one design activity, e.g., the design and implementation of a Frogger game and later applied to a completely different design task such as science simulation authoring. I think the research you are pointing to has neither the same aim nor a comparable scope of the work I am referring to.
More generally, my comment was not targeting gamestar. I just wish that people would do some homework before they post. It is actually possible to systematically investigate how well a tool will work in a classroom at motivational, cognitive and educational levels. This is not a poll for your favorite ice cream flavor.
It's awesome, it's free( as in freedom and as in beer ), and runs on linux, windows and mac.
Thanks for the lead. A lot of our videos so far have been of people/companies Tim ran into at conferences. If you have ideas for video stories (and we can now do Skype interviews) please email dansguardian@gmail.com
www.beklemeyin.net
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That is part of why I mentioned Scratch at the beginning of this discussion. Scratch has literally tens of thousands (more like in the hundreds of thousands at the moment) of software submissions that can be broken down by age, gender, and geographic location (ethnicity isn't being recorded to the best of my knowledge). In terms of the ages of the kids, it ranges from 3rd graders to college graduates developing software with those tools (with the sweet spot being mostly middle school kids with some high school kids doing most of the work).
As far as the quality of the submissions, most of them are very primitive in that development environment, and I'm not sure if a proper survey of the submissions has really been done, but my point is that the raw data is available from real content that can be evaluated if somebody would want to slug through that mass of data. Being MIT, I know some scholarly studies of the development environment have been done over the years. It just takes some graduate student hungry for a master's degree to plow through that data and try to massage it into a useful publication... or some professor wanting to enslave a group of graduate students for his own behalf to make that evaluation.
Interesting. I'm going to check it out.
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My children (girls, aged 5 and 6) love Little Big Planet and I think it's brilliant. Not only does it involve the game mechanics of traps/baddies/checkpoints and scoring points it also has really good logic (switches,sensors) controllable components (pistons,winches,motors) and really good physics: dense metals can crush you, light cardboard doesn't, helium balloons float, cogs/gears really will turn each other when you place them with their teeth interlocking with no "cheating" going on inside the game engine.
It's superb fun and educational in so many ways. Needless to say, when they've gone to bed of an evening I fire it up and make things too, seen as I don't have any Technic Lego any more :)
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
If you're anonymous then how will we recognize you? *scratches head*
Oi! I'm Anonymous. We are legion, etc etc etc.
Or they could just download Alice (which is much better
Tell me more
and teaches actual OOP)
I thought you said it was better?
Yeah, we know, and if you're not coding in assembly you're just a hipster dilettante.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You seem to be under the false impression that OOP makes development easier/faster/less error prone. Abstraction should offer at least some benefits, you know. All OOP has done is add unnecessary complexity, increase development time and costs, all while adding performance-killing overhead -- that's the opposite of what you want from abstraction.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Yes, but there is a big difference. Just about 100% of these users are self selected. In our study we have just about 0% self selected. It is not clear what one can learn from interpreting motivation or learning gains, especially without pre/post tests, from a self selected group. For all we know these users may already be interested or even experienced in programming. The real question is how well students who do not ever plan to show up on the Friday afternoon club or any other after school program, in other words 95% of students, would do.