I will be teaching a game design course for middle school. The plan is to teach game theory in 6th grade and create a physical game. In 7th I will introduce them to block coding and we will play around with scratch for 2D game creation. 8th grade, I would love to be in a studio year where they create their own 3D video game.
The school I am at wants us to teach kids that we can create things and market them, so the game has to be sellable for a very small fee. But my actual question is this. I will be learning ahead of time through training and also learning alongside my students. How plausible is it to ask my kids to make a 3D game? What kinds of games do you think are possible for them to make in 3D Unity? Any examples you could tell me that aret āsimpleā enough for 8th graders to figure out with enough time? I have most of my curriculum together for 6th and 7th, but I want to make sure my 8th graders will have something awesome yet possible for their last year at this school! Yes, all of the kids will have access to good computers to run Unity
Having some experience with teaching to various ages, i.e. workshops for younger kids and classes at the university level I would recommend deciding what outcomes you are after.
The easy way to get to a game is to kit-bash something together with assets and possibly a game template from GitHub. Kids initially find kit-bashing appealing because they can make something professional-looking without really knowing how to do things. Unreal is particularly good at this because of all the free assets and built-in things they can access. What I donāt like about this way of learning games is that I can pretty well predict what the game is going to look like, i.e. a player running around an environment with occasional loot or puzzles.
The harder way, but I think ultimately more creative and satisfying is to have them try to make their game from scratch. That means a simpler game, and maybe more time coming up with the concept. A colleague taught a course that focused on text-only and he was surprised how much the students enjoyed making it and playing it. So, maybe start with a text-only game idea and then allow them to add visuals 2D or 3D depending on their skill levels. I think 2D can allow them to get close to a professional look doing it on their own. Unity is the obvious choice for a 2D game and for a game that is an original design.
A simple, branching text adventure is relatively easy for them to code, so I think that might be a nice way to get started. Let them add the bells and whistles as they come up with ideas.
6th to 8th grade sounds fairly early.
At that age we literally just made a āconnect fourā game in a course at my school (and it already felt amazing to see it working). Not sure grasping the concepts of Unity or Unreal is that feasibleā¦ but maybe I underestimate the younger generation.
I would tend to agree. When I taught the younger ones, I feel that I was trying to hard to show them how āgoodā the game could look and be. Once you start getting into things like particles, character controllers, etc. thereās really no end to the complexity and options. That leads to finding and following examples, kit-bashing, etc. which I didnāt think was fun for them or me.
For example, Unity has a great Lego game, but itās basically done. Not sure what the students would be learning, other than how to work in the Unity editing environment.
Like you said, āconnect fourā is not incredibly advanced, but the satisfaction of working through how to actually make it, along with the logic, I think would be satisfying. Iām not a fan of connecting nodes to teach programming, so I would have them write the code. Ideally, with a good editor like Rider, itās so nice to see documentation/suggestions as you type. I think if more people started coding with an IDE they would stick with it!
Yeah definitely! While being able to code on your own is of course an important skill, an IDE makes it way more accessible and fun and at least in most languages itās what you can expect in your job later too.
For that reason we did the 4 in a row with Visual Studio (and Windows forms as the graphics library xD )
Iād expect them to devour programming knowledge if they become interested. Higher level concepts will fly over their head though (generics) and theyād benefit more from language like scratch.
8th grader is 14 those may be able to program arcade sim from scratch in a normal programming language, if they learned to program before.
The problem with 3d is animation. Animation is a royal pain to produce for 3d characters. However, physics game or vehicle game or a 2d game should be doable.
Note that significant achievement at this age require significant interest. Creator of Unturned was 16. Thatās not very far removed from 8th grade.
My issue is with the āproductā that the school wants to see them produce. I just cant see myself being able to get them to a marketable game by the end of 8th grade. Board games? Easy, but I feel like a full-fledged video game is near out of reach. Now, I can show what weāve worked on in class at an expo no doubt.
Keep any suggestions or experiences with this age group coming!
I think the requirement to āsell a gameā is ridiculous. To do that, somebody has to set up a store, link their bank account to it and then maintain everything. Who is that going to be? A student? The principle? Where do they want the kids to sell it? Steam, Google Play, App Store?
At my school, it often ends up being an Administrative Assistant who sets up the store and when they leave, absolutely no access to the account anymore. So the app is renamed, with a new Administrative assistant as the publisher.
Iād suggest something more like a Kickstarter campaign, where they see if itās possible to generate interest in fleshing out the game more. Or, just do something that is non-monetary like generating likes or votes. Or, get a non-profit account for the school and set it up as a free app. Then, they can see how many downloads as a way to measure the productās success.
I agree the commercial game requirement seems kinda crazy, especially for kids in the booger-eating age range.
Just wanted to add a few thoughts:
programming is only one part of making games. Some people will like it, many wonāt
art stuff is only one part of making games. some will like, others wont
parts of game making are fun and other parts are monotonous work. I doubt most kids would be ready for the monotonous work part, and you canāt force them to care. Therefore if some existing asset gets you past the monotonous work part faster and keeps ball rolling, thatās good.
it takes a team to make a game (team is more than just a bunch of people doing something in the same room). task have to be prioritized, communication has to go through a fine-tuning process, people have to conform and relegate egos, etc. Iād put most of my focus on the team building aspect and expect that if that goes smoothly, the resultant game is going to be something everybody is proud of. Donāt get it backwards. āWhen a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.ā In other words, the game shouldnāt be the measurement, it could be viewed secondary to the teams journey.
I think expecting adolescents to produce a marketable game honestly absurd, bordering on child labor. Even fully fledged business struggle with this, let alone some teenagers.
When I did 3d animation as my Uni course, and worked on a game as part of my major project, only 1 of the 8 teams making a game had a shippable product in the end.
Honestly getting the kids to produce a really small-scale project, probably just grifted from an existing game, and marking them based on the effort they put in, not on whether they ship something in the end, would be far more beneficial to the ones who get interested in this.
Good question. Knowing kids these days theyāre going to want to make their favourite mobile game, most of which would be way out of scope.
Though ones like Fruit Ninja (showing my age here) are pretty easy to do. Endless Runners style games could be approachable. Thatās about where my mobile game knowledge runs out, as I donāt play mobile games.
Perhaps see what they want to make, and shrink that down into a small as scale as possible. Idealy it should have as few overarching systems as possible, with a super simple gameplay loop.
I agree with @spiney199 , anything popular at the time would probably excite them. Flappy Bird was a good one when it came out. Today, I would say maybe a Vampire Survivors clone. But in 3D, I donāt know. If you check in the Hubs, there are multiple microgames. You could use that as a starting point. But maybe I overestimate what a 6th grader can do.
Sorry but to be honest, I donāt trust OP is right person for the task. For the first, trying use kids which just learning to make commercial products.
For the second, OP doesnāt understand, what programming involves, specially for yung people. Such skill requires probably years alone, of work in similar aeria.
If not knowing, what to give kids for learning, that is another red flag.
I donāt see to be honest intention in OP to actually teach kids, but how to make money of them, with low effort input from teacher, or school.
Sorry, but I donāt like it even a hinch.
I would not put my kid in such teacher hand. Would be waste of its time.
What? Is this serious? While I commend engaging and teaching kids game design ( though even that seems a bit restricted ) marketing and selling a game is a real WTF. If its just going through the motions, introducing kids to how you would market something and put it on the store then great ( though the amount of legal stuff these days is a pain to ensure compliance ), but if you are trying to actually get them to sell something then that seems unwise and if as it sounds this is the school trying to sell and profit off the students work then that is extremely unethical.
For one thing kids/students cannot enter a contract legally until they are 18 years old, so there is a whole bunch of stuff that they simply cannot do with releasing a game unless done through an adult ( and that might not strictly be legal either ). Secondly if the school is taking ownership over the students work and copyright that is another huge red flag. Its one thing for a business to do that, but they are paying you for work produced, that is not true for a school.
Overall the idea of trying to sell the students games seems badly conceived and should be carefully examined. It just seems to be opening up the school for a world of pain. Even if the games were released for free Iād still question it as it feels like the school is taking away the rights of the students to decide what to do with their own work.
As for the teaching and creating a game aspect. I would not be looking to have every student do this as it just seems impractical. Instead students should be taught the basics of the multiple disciplines of game design - designer, programmer, artist, sound designer etc, then split themselves into groups ( or be placed in groups ) and design a single game amongst themselves with each student taking on one or more disciplines. A great example of how this might work would be to watch the Double Fine - Amnesia Fortnight videos on youtube. Here, and here though i think there might be more.
I am a teacher hired for a job. Itās a brand new position where we have 5 different core classes that teach the beginning of job skills that they will continue to learn in highschool. The concept is to try to gain an interest and show them the basics of networking and marketing something to their community. The 5 classes are Art, Game Design, Buisness, Communications, and Agriculture. My question was how feasible is it to design something worth actually putting a price on it.
Thanks for literally assuming I was malicious and trying to profit. We arent expected to even make money off of it at all, its to show the kids what can be done and the steps to do so. I also dont see the money lmao
