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Welcome to the WebGame Making Club Blog

Welcome to the EdLab Web Game Club.   Many thanks for taking the time to look at our project. We will post our updates of our Club activities and any resources and games we create.

We are currently working on a resource is to support the Manchester  Game Making Club but we hope it will be of wider use so we are inviting other clubs and interested parties to contribute. We are currently looking for the following volunteers.

Home Educators – Getting real with Phaser

This week we kept going with our journey into the code in Phaser. Mick did some work on getting some examples together using the code pen online tool which is more suited to small bits of code.

I set up an account in CodePen to set it out and was impressed at how it looks. I also have signed up to pay for a PRO account as it lets me upload images and there’s a funky Professor mode which could be useful for sharing code examples in real time. We tested it out and it worked well encouraging students to play around with the examples.

Here’s a screenshot and link to the collection of short Phaser examples.

Rolls Cresent – Working on our Game Mechanics

This week we were working on our games in Scratch and finishing off work on our Game Plans including choosing 3 key Game Mechanics.

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Digital Braves Session – a drama based way to explore digital issues

Young people are growing up tracked. Digital technology means that by the time they come of age, they already have a complex and compromised online footprint. This tracking is inherently linked to our identities as consumers and uncomfortable choices we make everyday.  It is also the case that data is held and increasingly traded by governments, global corporations and cyber criminals. So what are our digital rights and why do we often give them away so freely?

Taking inspiration from dystopian science fiction classics 1984 and Brave New World, this drama based session sets out to explore this issue through the imagined-context of a near future new social order in which people are re-categorised as either Creatives or Consumers.  It is rooted in what Rainer and Lewis (2012) identify as ‘authentic learning’ through drama, and seeks to  motivate learners by locating encounters with technology within a fictitious world that feels ‘real’, challenging them to respond in complex ways to emerging themes and ideas.  From within the dramatic frame, participants are encouraged to explore what it might mean to live in such the new society

Athena’s comment – That was an “out of the ordinary” session.  It seems like we all participated emotionally, from the very beginning;  precisely from the moment that we were attributed roles and started playing in character.

It was interesting to find out that splitting in two teams could feel so emotional.  What it made it so real was the fictional  – but in play, pretty physical and real –  separation of one mother and her child.  Although not distressing, it did engage emotionally deeper.

For more infomation on the planning of this session on exploring the hidden costs of free service. see our resource page here.

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Starting Pixel Art (Session 2)

The mission: Create a game based on saving the Bees – we came up with ideas here. 

We did some Pixel Art drawing  using squared paper and then transferring our sketches to Piskel Tool.

A blog quote from Ted.

So all in all i loved the session because it was very creative and fun, just one thing i would like to add to out team is that we have a timer so that we have equal goes on the computer. Hope everyone else had a good time  – see you soon

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Making Arcade Consoles to Play Video Games

It was the last of our regular sessions with our Y4/5 Roll Crescent group of young people recently. So what better to do that play video games.

The learning element here was to use a combination of Arduino, Makey Makeys and authentic arcade buttons and joysticks to assemble DIY control panels.

It was also happening at the same time as the Playful Learning conference so there were plenty of other large scale games to play with as well.

This pilot was a good success. The joint motivation of really good quality electronic components and the final goal of playing retro games was irresistible for young and older alike!