Hi Everyone. My name is Steven Isaacs and I am a Computer Teacher at William Annin Middle School in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. In addition to teaching, I owned a Computer Training and Gaming Center for 10 years. I am an avid gamer and technophile. It has become a passion of mine to expose my students to the possibilities of Game Design and Development as a means of teaching programming concepts. When Liberty Corner Computing (the training and gaming center) was open, we offered a number of classes and camps that focused on design and development of games. At William Annin Middle School, game programming has been introduced in a number of ways. The programming courses include the programming of games. In addition, the 7th grade Gifted and Talented program has a unit on game design and development using GameMaker (http://www.yoyogames.com). GameMaker is a wonderful (and free) tool for computer game design. It allows students to program games within an easy to use grapical drag and drop environment. The sky is the limit as advanced programming concepts can be utilized through the drag and drop interface as well as the built in programming language (GML - GameMaker Language). The 7th grade cycle is a six week course. In addition, GameMaker has been used widely in the after school computer club at William Annin.
Next year, we are introducing a new semester long 8th grade elective in Game Design and Development. The intention is for this class to offer an experience in game design and development to a variety of students. Hopefully, students interested in graphic design as well as programming will join together to work on design teams to create interesting games. The course will introduce kids to GameMaker, Alice, and Visual C# and XNA Studio. Students who are capable will write games with XNA Studio that can be played on the Xbox 360.
Exciting stuff!
