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help kids or die » Make Your Own Games – Making Video Games for a Government Class

I have a special education student that wants to grow-up to be a video game designer. He’s very functional, but emotionally several years behind his peer group. Reading level not too far off where it should be, and in reality probably close to where most of my students are. I think he has a lot to bring to the class. I’ve just got to figure out how to get it out of him.

I spent a little time last night, looking for game engines that were free and easy to use. I found Sploder and I think it’s going to get this kid started.

You can’t do much else with Sploder. It lets you make a little space-ship shooter game. Now if you’re saying to yourself “What the heck does that have to do with teaching government”, then I’m going to have to ask you to get out of my head. GET OUT OF MY HEAD. I’ve been dealing with that all day and here’s what I’ve come up with:

All video games are about problem solving. Right now I’ve got my students working on adding an Amendment to the Constitution. Why do we add amendments to our Constitution (Yes. I know. To keep power in the hands of the few. Get down inner anarchist. Down, boy.)? We add amendments to solve problems. After this student makes his game we’ll talk about the problems he had to solve to create the game and to play the game. Then we can start to make the connections between solving those problems and how we try to solve problems by adding amendments to the Constitution.

The next step: I’ve applied for a free license of GLbasic for my school. Once I get this student going on Sploder I think I can get him into this program.

This should be a fun project. One that requires walking away from the rest of my curriculum. But what did I have to lose? How amazing is the possible pay off?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 8:19 pm and is filed under teaching, teaching tools, web 2.0. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.