FG Scalable Game Design - leemet16/game-design-toolkit GitHub Wiki

There are many development tools available to create video games. Options we've highlighted in the Game Design Toolkit include ARIS, Kodu, GameMaker Studio, and Scratch. These options provide a range of capabilities and skill requirements.

As a facilitator, you will need to be aware of the characteristics of these tools. For instance, a team that is new to programming and computational thinking may find that GameMaker Studio is overwhelming and may find more success with Scratch. Whereas, a team that has some background and experience in programming and computational thinking may find that Scratch is uninteresting and crave a bigger challenge. The Zones of Proximal Flow, as shown in Fig 1, highlights that a successful effort to introduce and broaden game development needs to put the right tools, techniques, and students together (Repenning, 2012). Think of it as a take on Goldilocks; each team should have the tools and techniques that are "just right."

Fig 1. Repenning, A. (2012). Programming goes back to school. Communications of the ACM, 55(5), 38-40.

References

Basawapatna, A. R., Koh, K. H., & Repenning, A. (2010, June). Using scalable game design to teach computer science from middle school to graduate school. In Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (pp. 224-228). ACM.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). Toward a psychology of optimal experience. In Flow and the foundations of positive psychology (pp. 209-226). Springer Netherlands.

Repenning, A., & Ioannidou, A. (2008, March). Broadening participation through scalable game design. In ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 305-309). ACM.

Repenning, A., Webb, D., & Ioannidou, A. (2010, March). Scalable game design and the development of a checklist for getting computational thinking into public schools. In Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (pp. 265-269). ACM.

Repenning, A. (2012). Programming goes back to school. Communications of the ACM, 55(5), 38-40.