Teaching with Gamestar Mechanic

Gamestar Mechanic is a tool that allows the user to create their own game. After exploring its potential uses in the classroom I designed a lesson for my students to create their own game as part of a middle school computer class.

Students were given the task to design a game using the tools in game star mechanic. Their games needed to meet some basic requirements designed to make the students try a variety of tools without being structured in a way that would stifle their creativity. Below my sample game Miss Britt's Challenge is embedded into the page so you can see an example of the types of games my students could create. Make sure your adobe flash player is up to date in order to view and play the game.

Below is a video of how to play my game. In this video I describe how it fits the assignment requirements, how it may be useful to my students, and what I am expecting from them. This video was created to help other educators understand the objectives and implementation of this lesson. This video could also be used to show students an example of the assignment and to help them understand the purpose of the assignment.

Finally we have my lesson plan for this game design assignment. In this lesson plan I outline the objectives for this task and the procedure of how I would help my students meet those objectives.

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Reflection

I learned a lot about game design as I created this artifact. I learned about the level of planning and decision making that goes into game creation. Also that the process can involve a lot of trial and error. This activity was more time consuming than I expected it to be because I was a novice. As I learned more about the tools available and how to be strategic with my decisions it went faster. I started this process knowing that do not enjoy video games because I do not like to follow the story and I do not like to lose. Throughout this process I gained a better appreciation for video games and the problem solving skills they can teach our students.