Student Designs

[Paul Pivec]

Each year I am fortunate to be involved in Maja Pivec's Game-Based Learning class at the FH in Graz. At the beginning of the semester, only a few students are interested or appear motivated. But as the term progresses, Maja motivates them into producing, in my view as a commercial developer, world-class game designs for educational games.

Sadly, be it due to no funding, no time, no programming skills, these designs remain only as designs. You can see some of them here
http://ind.fh-joanneum.at/de/node/493
http://ind.fh-joanneum.at/de/node/796
http://ind.fh-joanneum.at/de/node/791

Remember that these are design students and hence create great designs. Wouldn't it be great if design students from one University could collaborate with programming students from another. I attempted to achieve this about 7 years ago in New Zealand. The logistics were a nightmare, but the results were very rewarding. Also, it not only gave the students a different view on how to work as a group, but also gave them experiences that they would not normally have - experiences that they would need in the real world.

Has anyone heard of other institutions doing this? Or would anyone like to collaborate in something like this?

They other idea would be to attain funding to allow a commercial developer (such as myself) to make these designs a reality. But where would that funding come from and who would own the IP?

[pmendoza]

Hello Paul.

In Florida we have a vocational training degree on “development of computing applications”. I'm teaching in the first course of that degree, but my subject is not about development (it's about hardware and operating systems), it doesn't matter. I'm in good terms with teachers in second year, where there is a project subject and it would be easy for them to adapt to develop some think like you propose. In that subject students should develop a complete application in groups, since january to march.

Last year the teachers let the students define the application to develop and they decide to develop a strategic game, and the result was quite good (not commercial, but interesting).

For this year I was asking teachers to develop a simple GBL, the main idea was to present better results to the pineapple awards. I would need the basis of the award. Could you send me?

I will be in touch with teacher responsible in September and final proposals could change until January. If you give me ideas I could propose to them.

In my conversation with responsible teachers, we were talking to try to address students to some kind of “Trivial pour-suite” game (or some thing similar), where master users could upload questions in different subjects, rules for players will be based on trivial or ludo, the game will implement some kind of incremental punctuation (with bonus, rebounds, useful for evaluation, etc...), statistics (about students, questions and subjects), multiuser, possibly multi language and online features.

My proposals will be evaluated by teachers to determine if satisfies expectations on the subject (here I think no problem), but in the end, proposals will be reformulated by the students, who define their own application.

Let me know other ideas.
Regards.
Pau