Juan Diego digital multimedia students learn game-making skills

Creating a computer educational game is a different “ball game” than playing one.

About 20 Juan Diego Catholic High School digital multimedia students learned this lesson through eight classes with guest instructor and game animator Paul Metcalfe. In November and December, Metcalfe worked with students to design and develop maze-designed games that included educational components; create characters or sprites; establish rooms and backgrounds; and incorporate music. They learned this through Game Maker Lite.

“I wanted the students to conduct research on a theme related to food; educate their game-players by incorporating it into the game they created,” Metcalfe said. “Then, I wanted them to test the game on a group of students and get their feedback, incorporate that and then pitch their prototype to the class. This program is much more than the stereotype idea of escaping by playing a game on the computer.”

Metcalfe, who is the animation director of EA, donated his time through his own company, Idea Lab Education LLC. He also created and directed the pilot program to help foster interactive media development in the classroom.

Students first learned all aspects of how to create a computer game in November, and then, in early December, divided into teams to develop games, artwork, incorporate music and other aspects. On Dec. 12, each team presented its results to the class.

Sophomore Alex Page said that beforehand, she was unaware of all the details involved in the game-making process.

“You just don’t have a sprite that moves from room to room,” she said. “You have to create the character, make a room, create a path for it, have a background to go with it and all the steps to figure out what all you need and how they all go together. And then, you need to have a point of your game so you can educate people while playing the game.”

Junior Shelise Davis said that she used her game-playing knowledge to create a new game.

“Our team decided our game would teach elementary school players about the basic food groups and used shapes to teach them to eat the healthy stuff and stay away from things like ice cream,” she said. “We used what we thought would be fun and engaging in a game, and tried to create it. We learned a lot of animation skills and learned that to create games, there’s a lot of teamwork and precision involved.”

Metcalfe said that many of these students are “digital natives,” or students who have grown up playing some games, using computers or texting on cell phones so learning the skills came as second-nature.

“It was amazing to see how creative they were while learning and working together. This taught them to identify something they want to teach, brainstorm and create a solution for it in the format of an educational computer game,” he said.

Metcalfe and Juan Diego multimedia design teacher John Kilbourn plan to collaborate in the spring, perhaps introducing iPhone apps to be used in education and eventually, offering an advanced placement class in animation.