Synopsis for Gaming After-School: Boys and Girls Clubs of America Game Design Curriculum

PETLab, a collaboration between Parsons the New School for Design and Games for Change, is developing a game design curriculum for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCA). The curriculum is designed to expose up to 5 million BGCA members to the principles and methods of game design, and to assist in the development of communication, systems thinking, and technology skills. The curriculum models the iterative design process— play, design, play test, and iterate—and covers game basics, puzzles, narrative in games and games and social issues.

The BGCA Game Design Curriculum is a program utilizing principles of active learning through the play and creation of games. The 4,000+ BGCA clubs around the country each have their own culture, community context and socio-economic situation. To create a program that can fit the individual clubs, we have created a modular curriculum that can be run with or without computers in a variety of contexts and time frames.

Our presentation will illustrate our pedagogical approach, the curriculum, and assessment results from the pilot tests run in March, 2009. The authors are interested in receiving feedback on the curriculum from other game design educators. The authors also hope to solicit involvement by summit participants at the local club level for the program.