Recently, I was on Twitter, looking for ideas for my up coming game design unit. I have been planning a game design unit as our next media literacy project after the holidays...I have looked at roblox.com, challengeyou.com and Batman Game Creator --but I couldn't quite settle on any one site.
It wasn't until I chanced upon Kevin Hodgson, a Gr. 6 teacher in Massachusetts, that I found the perfect game design site and also some great ideas for its implementation! This post on his class blog site, makes great connections between design and writing. The site he is using, gamestarmechanic.com, also incorporates writing into the game process. If you take a look at the Intro Video, you can see why, as an educator, I like this design site so much! And I really like how the games are 'old school' arcade style!
Chatting with Mr. Hodgson about his game designing, I happened to tell him about our video game review writing project that we are just completing...he was very interested in that and I sent him our graphic organizer to use as a template. His class has now started writing game reviews...and he also told another teaching friend, Kent Manning (a fellow Ontarian, located in Prince Edward County) about the reviews...so now the three of us, through the sharing power of Twitter, are similarly designing games and writing game reviews! Through Twitter, we inspired each other & shared resources. This is very cool!
Our game design unti will start in January and our game reviews are almost completed. The reviews that I have seen so far are so amazing, I feel I can't just pick one 'student guest blogger' for this assignment. In fact, I hope to put up these reviews on their own distinct page!
I am very much looking forward to January and our game designs! Stayed tuned for more info after the break...!
PS. Mr. Hodgson found this ehow description regarding 'how to write a video game review'. I hadn't seen this before starting our project, but I'm glad to see that our plan was quite similar to the 'real life' version, only missing a few steps!
And I am happy to have stumbled into you, too (sorry if I bumped ya). That's the great thing about the various online places .. not just the sharing but the learning.
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