Game Education Summit North America

Paper Abstract:

Here’s a riddle for you: How do you teach game design through the creation of a game design curriculum? This and other pedagogical puzzles will be explored as we present the culmination of two years of work creating two after-school game design curricula for youth with the assistance of graduate students. This session will look at questions like:

• Can learning how to create game-based curricula reveal important lessons in game design?
• How do the tools of game design, such as prototyping, playtesting and iteration play out through curriculum design?
• What are the dynamics of design, play and power among students of design, professors, youth, foundations, after school clubs and assessors?

This session will explore these questions by presenting examples from a project to create a nationally distributed game design curriculum for middle-school aged youth sponsored by the AMD Foundation by PETLab at Parsons The New School for Design. Stories and findings from within this extended collaborative experiment to innovate game design education will be told in order to reveal lessons learned in the quest for the alchemical mix between play and learning.