Game Design and Writing: Reflections on my First PBL

This fall at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School, my students and I embarked on a new adventure: Game Design and Writing! It was the first time I had done a full-fledged PBL "Project-Based Learning" Unit, although I did elements of this instructional style while teaching in Douglas County public schools, particularly with my Gifted classes. I initially thought the unit would take two weeks. However, due to special events at school and logistics, it took closer to 3 1/2 to 4 start to finish. This was earlier in the year than I anticipated doing a PBL, to be honest. I initially thought I would not do one until late first semester or even second semester, especially since I am new to my school. But all things considered, I am glad we went all in and dove into this adventure together. I believe it helped me to bond with our students and our classes to feel even more like a community.

Along the way, I learned many lessons, which I thought I would share with my fellow educators and friends: 

1. There is so much more to game design and writing than I thought! I am a proud member of several fandom and/or nerd communities, including Georgia Football, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, YA literature, comics, the list could go on. Gaming is not one that I know as much about, although I have several friends who are into it, as academics, players, or both. I've heard them talk about the passion of getting involved in another world, the storytelling aspects of it, etc. But until I saw my students engage with this project, I took it for granted how much creativity goes into board games, card games, and video games. There's so much to consider: the rules, the explanations, the world building (when applicable), and with educational games like the ones my students made, the concept and how to best utilize the game to teach it. I knew that game design took hard work and attention to detail, but there's a lot of creativity involved as well. I wonder what courses game designers take in school to help them learn these skills, besides computer programming/design for those who create video games.

2. If you let them, the students will teach you so much! As far as (older) Millennials/Oregon Trail generation folks go, I am reasonably adept at technology, but I'm not superb at it. Some of my students have a natural knack for coding, though, and they created video games that were well beyond what I expected for young adolescents in the seventh grade. Plus, thanks to my students and also to my friend and colleague Rachel K. Sanders, I learned about several excellent computer game design programs that are easy and student-friendly. Scratch is the one that most of my students utilized. But there are others, such as Game Star Mechanic, Twine, and Unity. Coding is a process that involves mathematical thinking and reason in addition to the creative thought of making the game, and observing this process in my students gave me a whole new perspective of this activity. There's also a lovely program called "Hour of Code" for those who are interested in teaching your students more about coding. Thank you, Rachel, for this tip! https://hourofcode.com/us.

3. Like so many things in life, it's good to have a schedule and a plan, but to allow room for flexibility. People who know me well know that I tend to be a planner, in all areas of life. Without going into a whole psychoanalysis of Dr. M. Robbins, ENFP's on the Myers Briggs Scale/Personality Test do not feel the need to control other people, but we do not like to feel controlled.   sometimes felt that the logistics of PBL planning and execution, along with the inevitable interruptions of school life, were things that I could not plan or control, and that was hard for me at times. However, I learned to go with the flow. I spent hours planning out each day of this project ahead of time, along with deadlines. Although I stuck to the deadlines, the daily plan did not always go quite as I anticipated. Yet I realized that so long as I was giving my students the support, encouragement, and resources that they needed, it would all turn out fine, and in fact it turned out much better than fine. I trusted the students to pace themselves on the project, and I think they learned from the process of having to collaborate with others in order to design an attractive, thoughtful game while still meeting a deadline. We had constraints of time, space, and resources, but that's true of real world projects as well. I might make some tweaks in the future in terms of the direction I give students with pacing and timing, but overall, the process went better than I thought, even when I had to let go of control more than I wanted to.

4. High expectations bring positive results 
At times, I couldn't help but wonder if I was asking too much of my students when I assigned them to create a game, directions for the game, a two paragraph expository explanation of the game, and a narrative story to accompany the game, with Jumanji serving as an example. They worked in teams of 2-3, although the narrative component was individual. Overall, they ended up blowing my expectations out of the water. Granted, my students are bright and have a lot of home support. As a teacher over the years, though, I've found that students will usually rise to the bar that you set for them, particularly if you've taken the time to get to know them and to meet them where they are.

5. Collaborating with other classes is so much fun! I need to continue to be open to this. 
For me, one of the most rewarding aspects of the project was having my students interview younger students prior to creating their games and testing them out on the same students at the project's end. I thank our school's PBL consultant Shayna Cooke for suggesting this idea and also my colleagues in other grade levels Ashton Booher, Carolyn Edwards, and Jayne Liu for participating in this aspect of the project. The students worked hard to prepare and rehearse interview questions prior to meeting the younger students, and it was good for them to know that they had an audience. Watching my seventh graders play the games they created with the younger students at the end was amazing for all involved. I was so proud of how students in both classes responded to the experience. It made me want to do more cross-class collaborations.

I look forward to my next PBL project and thank everyone who came with me on this game design project journey. May the skills we learned remain with us, and I look forward to working together to #designabetterworld.