The Wire

What does it take to design games for a living? This month, one video design company's awesome staff generously gave up two Wednesday nights to answer that question. Mouse Squads recently got two opportunities to check out what happens at the back end of BrainPOP, the curriculum based video and game design company!

Only by working with real-live students, they told us, could they make their design as fun, easy, and educational as BrainPOP is known to be. After some snacks and a quick icebreaker, we were invited into a conference room where students sat in swivel chairs around a long table. We felt like real game designers.

Youth from Global Kids led a workshop on serious games, using cards from Grow-a-Game. This helped us to break down game design into its different components. What are the parts of a game? How can a familiar game be redesigned to solve a real-world problem, such as poverty or racism?

Those who attended the first workshop got to work with BrainPOP's "User Experience" (or UX for short) department. They created personas of people who might use the BrainPOP on a smartphone or tablet. Suggestions that came from this included a glossary that defines hard words and a way to access the BrainPOP app while offline.

The second workshop focused on playtesting a new BrainPOP game that it still under development. After playing it for a few minutes we found a lot of bugs in the game! We even got the chance to design our own level, hashing it out on paper for the BrainPOP game design team.

Special thanks to BrainPOP for hosting and Global Kids for playing with us!