Flash Videos

The video demos on this site require the Flash Player to be installed. It can be obtained free from Macromedia 

Why design and make games?

Programming and designing games helps in the development and enhancement of the student's critical thinking, logic and problem solving skills, while learning the importance of attention to detail. Computer programming requires students to analyse a task, then take well-defined logical rules and apply them in a creative and unique way to meet a specific objective. By learning the fundamental principles of software design, not only does the student better understand the software used throughout our society, but he/she develops the critical thinking skills that will help in all areas of life.

Some of the benefits of students designing and programming games on computers are:

• Students are more engaged in class
• They enjoy playing each other's games
• They are keen to swap ideas and help each other solve problems.
• Much more work than normal occurs outside of lesson times.
• The ability to solve problems is intellectually demanding and engages learners in higher-order thinking skills.
• It promotes procedural thinking.
• It fosters creativity.
• Programming games promotes metacognition ie thinking about thinking.
• It increases basic knowledge about computers.
• Game design encourages analysis and exploration of maths and science concepts.
• Programming increases logical thinking ability and efficient mathematical reasoning.

Game Playing

Klik and Play comes with 10 built in games.  It is important for students to play these games (or some like them) in the initial phase of learning to use Klik & Play, so that they can see possible types of games that can be made and get an understanding of what is required in a game that they design themselves.

If after some time playing these games, they become a distraction for some students, then you have a couple of options:

• use normal classroom rules for game playing at inappropriate times
• delete or rename the gamepack folder, which will disable the 'Play a Game' option from the start up menu.

It is important however, that students are given the opportunity to play each other's completed games to give feedback for improvement and as part of an authentic assessment process. 

Completed games and any associated sound files can be copied to the gamepack folder, (you could delete the supplied games) and they will then appear on the start up screen.  The name and icon for the game are created in the Storyboard Editor under Edit > Game Setup.

Resources

Essential Learnings (Tasmania) Learning Sequences

Why Play Games?

Game On Studios

Game On Studios have a complete set of copyright free lesson plans and worksheets about Computer Gaming and the industry available at http://gameon.nms.ac.uk/worksheets.htm 

OOP Lesson Plans

A complete set of 16 lesson plans and teaching resources for using Klik & Play to introduce Object Oriented Programming concepts can be found at http://www.ozedweb.com/index/its_oops.htm 

Where to now?

Once your students have completed some of the enterprise based activities, and they are looking to expand their horizons, a useful next step may be to progress to Gamemaker.  Gamemaker is a completely free programming environment (you can even sell the games you make) and students should find it a more sophisticated programming environment.  

Alternatively, you or they may wish to progress to programming Powerpoint using Visual Basic for Applications.  (Tutorial and notes available from this site)

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This page has been produced by Margaret Meijers.  Questions concerning its content may be directed by email to margaret.meijers@education.tas.gov.au.  This page was last modified on Tuesday, 05 September 2006. The URL for this page is http://www.mindtools.tased.edu.au/knp/teachers.htm .

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	Some pages of this site have been developed with support from the SiMERR Project.