Wednesday, August 23, 2023
11:00 am-12:30 pm Pacific / 2:00-3:30 pm Eastern

Online via Zoom

Designing, making, testing, and teaching games engages a range of high level cognitive skills, running the gamut of Bloom’s taxonomy and beyond.  Facts, concepts, and relations have to be rethought and reorganized, and new connections and understandings made.  Making games is a powerful way to explore how seemingly disparate elements can interact, and generate complexity and surprise.  Creating physical games out of basic elements like paper and pen can also be a welcome respite from screen fatigue, and engage spatial and mechanical reasoning that are difficult to reach digitally.

In this workshop, we will discuss a broad overview of kinds of games, and the basic interactions that make them up – the mechanics.  Then we will run through an entire cycle of the game making process, brainstorming, creating paper prototypes, play testing, and teaching.  No previous experience with game design is needed, nor are any special materials.  Please do have at least some paper and pens handy, and markers, scissors, coins, and the like may also be useful.