Students as game designers
Play · 5 min read · Evidence: Emerging
When students design games instead of only playing them, they practise planning, explaining rules and testing ideas. Most research so far looks at digital game-making and coding; paper and board game design in ordinary classrooms is less studied.
Making a game is harder than it looks. A student has to decide what the player is trying to do, write rules that others understand, test whether the game is fair and fix it when it is not. Each of these steps asks for the kind of thinking schools value: planning, clear writing, reasoning about cause and effect, and responding to feedback.
What the research says
Yasmin Kafai and Quinn Burke reviewed 55 studies from about a decade of research on children making games (Kafai & Burke, 2015). Most of these studies focused on learning to code or on academic content, such as designing a maths or science game. Far fewer looked at collaboration or at how game-making affects students' sense of who they are as learners. The authors argue that making games deserves as much attention as playing them, because it can build technical skills and connect students with one another.
Because most of this work involves computers and programming, we label the evidence for low-tech classroom game design as Emerging. The idea is promising and well-grounded in how children learn by making things, but it has not been tested in large trials.
A simple design cycle for the classroom
Goal. What is the player trying to do?
Rules. Write no more than five. Can another group read them and start playing?
Test. Another group plays while the designers watch silently.
Feedback. Players say one thing that worked and one thing that confused them.
Improve. Designers change one rule and test again.
Linking the game to a topic makes it more than a break activity. A class studying recycling might design a sorting game; a class studying a historical journey might design a route game with decisions at each step.
Try this tomorrow. Play Rule Makers: give groups three objects and ten minutes to invent a game with a goal, two rules and a way to win. Each group teaches its game to another.
Related resource: game 10 in our free Play Starter Guide, Rule Makers, is a 20-minute first step into game design. A full student workbook is coming soon to EduStore.
Sources / Further reading
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