Game Design with Year 6 at Cromer Public School

My Year 6 class have been busy this year designing and building games using Kodu.

To give you a little bit of background information on my students, last year, in Year 5, they were involved in the MacICT Game Design project with Kahootz. My students built games related to many aspects of the curriculum including:

• literature, particularly the book Rowan of Rin by Emily Rodda
• micro-organisms
• maths
• spelling

This year, my students have been using the software Kodu to design and build their own games. Kodu is a visual programing language made specifically for creating games. The students have learnt how to create their own 3D worlds and then program objects to interact with each other and the player. We initially experimented with racing games and now the students have just finished designing and building their first arcade game. We have had a few technical hiccups along the way with running Kodu on the NSW Department's T4L roll out machines, but have managed to work out a base platform on which to run Kodu successfully.

A few of my students created the Prezi below for our class blog about using Kodu to design games.

Kodu on Prezi

We also set up a wall in wallwisher where the students reflected on what they had learnt on their journey into game design and some of the challenges they faced.



Next term, some students will go onto designing games in Kodu or Kahootz as part of a rich task related to our Science unit on sustainability, 'Cool Kids for a Cool Climate'.