It's Over!

Hey NYC Mouse Squads! Thanks for coming out to The Island School on March 29th, April 5th and April 19th to learn all about Game Design and Serious Games! Students ate pizza, played serious games like Ayiti: The Cost of Life, learned the basics of game design and even created paper prototypes for their own Serious Game on bullying in schools.

We had four schools participating in this awesome workshop series. Thank you so much to the squad at the Island School for hosting this workshop series and a thank you to these schools for coming out!

• The Island School
• I.S. 318
• Lewis and Clark High School
• P.S. 55 Benjamin Franklin

Our first session focused on the essentials of Game Design. We all signed up for accounts on Gamestar Mechanic, the free game about making games. Then we created our own games out of random objects we found like soda bottles, lightsabers and plastic Easter eggs!

The next time we met, we studied the difference between Serious Games and regular old games. Serious Games teach you about real issues, like bullying and pollution, just by playing the game! We also played a card game called Grow a Game to practice modifying existing games to be about serious issues.

Finally, we learned about the Iterative Process of Design and Paper Prototyping. Before a game gets programmed on a computer, game designers test it out by playing a paper version of their game. We played the finished digital version AND the paper prototype of Ayiti: The Cost of Life. By the end of our third session, everyone had created their own paper prototype of a game about Bullying in Schools.

Hopefully these games will get fine-tuned and turned into finished digital games that we can play at Emoti-Con! It was so much fun working on these game designs. We at Mouse are sure they will be great games!

For more pictures, check out the flickr link here!

Thanks to everyone who showed up and made this workshop series awesome! You rule! We can't wait to see you at more Mouse Squad events!