This sounds fantastic Ryan!! And entire class for middle-schoolers on Games and Game Design?!?! That totally rocks!! West Virginia won't know what hit it!! :)
Just checking - have you seen Andy's 11 Principles of Game Design?
http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Andy/Games/DesignPrinciples.htmlThere's also his thoughts on how he created Chrononauts
http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Andy/Games/CreatingChrono.htmland links to other thoughts, ideas, essays and Game Design Stuff:
http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Andy/GameDesign.html
And I'm NOT promising anything here (I haven't even talked to Andy to see if he's interested...) but would your school pay travel expenses for Andy to have him come speak at your school and work with your kids as a "Game Designer in Residence For A Day" ?? You're only a few hours drive from DC - it might be possible to arrange such a thing.....what do you think?
As for rubrics - I'm with you on where your anxiety level is at for that... but they shouldn't be *too* hard... let us know what we can do to help!!
Oh.. and take a look at Stonehenge when it comes out - one box of Board-And-Pieces with 5 very different games in it. Andy's designing another game for it (this past week's story on Wunderland was about it - with links to the design journal for that game...
http://www.wunderland.com/WhatsOld/2007/WN.02.15.07.html)
Keep us updated! This rocks!
Carol
On 2/21/07, miyu <xmiyux@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Nothing is set in stone yet so no quoting me on the main page of the site :p
This morning I heard second hand that when working on the master schedule for the year after next when my school changes from a Junior High (grades 7-9) to a Middle School (grades 6-8) that I have a good probability of having a 9 weeks class on developing critical thinking skills. The course will be based on developing critical thinking skills through board games. This means that I will have this summer to draw up a good plan of action for what games I need to buy as well as rubrics and a curriculum to teach them.
Tentatively I'm hoping to have them play a few European games as well as several abstracts to get a feel for what games can be like outside of Monopoly and Clue and then embark on a final project of game design.
This is where I would love some suggestions because I will need to develop a guided methodology to approach designing a game with a small group. I'm planning on getting a large amount of pyramids and have them design a game that will utilize the pyramids in some fashion. I also hope to have a toy chest with glass beads, dice, chess boards, maybe some meeples, wooden blocks, and any other odds an ends they might be able to integrate. Then the difficulty will be designing rubrics to actually grade all this work *laugh*. Needless to say I'm simultaneously excited and nervous about all the work to develop the class. Hopefully though it will go well and I can make my plans/experiences available to everyone else online and make it easier for someone to develop something similar down the road.
I just had to share my exciting news with some other like minded individuals and can't talk about it much at school because the master schedule isn't set in stone yet and I'm afraid of jinxing myself.
-Ryan
--
Ora, lege, lege, lege, relege, labora et invenies.
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