How Your Students Can Make Their Own Video Game with Gamestar Mechanic

Are you being pressured by your Principal to utilize more projects in your classroom based around the STEMS standards? Are your students bored with projects and you have no way to connect with them? Does it seem that they only want to talk about how far they made it on the Zombie level of Call of Duty, and not how important your instruction will mean to their future? Well then, look no further because now you will have the opportunity to teach to your students' strengths and interests as they create video games utilizing the free web site - Gamestar Mechanic.

I first learned about Gamestar Mechanic when I received an email from Scholastic and their Level Up promotion. Their little article, outlined what could be done with Gamestar Mechanic, along with all of its benefits to teach the STEMS, Language Arts, Science and Visual Arts standards. I had to show the article to my Principal in order to get Gamestar Mechanic approved, as our School District's Technology Department was a little leery about letting students play video games during the school day.

Once the site was approved, I had to explore and experiment, which I would highly recommend to any teacher that would want to utilize any form of technology in their classroom -- as you need to be somewhat familiar with it first. Unfortunately, I have too many colleagues out there that are just too intimidated by new forms of technology, especially when their students are going to be more informed and skilled with it than they are. But fret not teachers, the way that Gamestar Mechanic is laid out, teaching content through video games will be a breeze.

The core concept around Gamestar Mechanic is Read it, Learn it, Play it, Edit it, Earn it, Create it and Publish it. The site's guiding principles are divided amongst three sections. Quest is a story that is infused with the basic principles of video game design. Each episode in the quest starts off with a digital comic, drawn in the Japanese Manga style, and after you read what the episode is about, you then get to play five small levels called missions. The students may find these as quite simple at first, but they do get harder as you advance through the quest. The missions will vary from simply playing a level, editing something that is broken in the game or solving a timed maze.

What is great at the end of nearly each mission is that the gamer is rewarded with a prize of some sort. Whether they receive a new character (called a sprite) to include into their game or permission to publish their game, I have seen even my toughest students jump with joy when they unlock something. Which is why I feel that so many of our students love video games, they get that instant gratification of a prize, whether it is an unlocked achievement or they save the Princess, it keeps them motivated when they can accomplish small obtainable goals. In fact, your students will not be able to publish their game until they complete all five episodes in their quest, and whether or not they realize it, as the students play the games in your class, they learn the basics of video game design and simple programming steps.

I came into Gamestar already feeling a bit frustrated with video games in the classroom after utilizing Scratch with my students. Scratch is a free downloadable program that allows students to create video games and animations by learning simple drag and drop programming code, but there was only a small percentage of my students that really grasped the material, an even a smaller chunk of them that downloaded the program on their home computer to continue their own independent progress. But teachers, don't feel intimidated if you don't know anything about video games, game design or programming -- as Gamestar Mechanic has plenty of resources and lesson plans.

When I found out that my students didn't need to worry about downloading a program, which programming codes would go with which sequence and that I wouldn't have to constantly intervene over technological difficulties, I instantly invested my research time into Gamestar Mechanic. They have a specific section of their web site called the Learning Guide, which is loaded with resources and lesson plans for teachers. I really liked how neat and effective their lesson plans were laid out, especially their focus on playing in the classroom (my middle school students freaked out with excitement when they found out they had to play musical chairs and hopscotch one day in class). The lesson plans were able to effectively and easily pace my students through the five episodes of the quest, along with providing me with final project ideas based around Greek Mythology, Patterns and Tessellations. I was able to take most of the "Getting Started" lessons and I converted them into an interactive Prezi for my students along with other lesson plans for our project.

The other two primary features of the Gamestar Mechanic would be the Workshop and Game Alley. Workshop is essentially the student's home page and profile. It keeps track of the awards and trophies that they have unlocked, their favorite games that they may have found on the site, messages of when someone assesses their game, templates that students can modify into their own games and finally updates on video game design challenges and nation-wide competitions for cash prizes. Game Alley features all of the games made by your students, along with games made by people from all around the world.

For my class, I made up a website called Mrg's Games, which was basically a Game Alley for our school. I had a competition amongst all of our students to see who could get their game played the most, by utilizing the publishing feature of Gamestar Mechanic, along with encouraging the students to rate and assess their peers utilizing the Game Alley features of the site. The winning students in our little competition were filmed in a commercial for the web site and I published it on You Tube, and the school got a big kick out of seeing the wrestling/motor cross madness inspired skits, and in turn, it got more students to play the students' games, learn about our material and Gamestar Mechanic and then those students created their own games.

In closing, I really enjoyed teaching my students video game design with the Gamestar Mechanic web site. The site is free, but there are premium features that you can pay for, which would give your students essentially more characters to use and more classroom management of student profiles. The site is loaded with great resources for teachers and parents, and they constantly reinforce their principles of having fun while learning. Also, if utilizing more video games projects interests you, I would teach the basic game design principles with Gamestar Mechanic, but then build upon it with programming skills utilized in Scratch or Alice, which teaches students programming in a three dimensional environment. I would heavily encourage any teacher that is hoping to reach their students with technology to utilize this site, and in doing so, you will be giving them the principles to help prepare them as twenty-first century learners.

References:

http://gamestarmechanic.com/

http://www.scholastic.com/createvideogames/?eml=SMP/e/20110311/email///AMD/SL1///////

http://scratch.mit.edu/

https://sites.google.com/a/elinemedia.com/gsmlearningguide/home

http://prezi.com/8qdggog_t3aa/game-star-mechanic-instructions/ - My Gamestar instructions Prezi

http://mrgsgames.blogspot.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0JrVjMTHBU -- Game website commercial

http://www.alice.org/