I’ll present about the Game Design class I teach for Winooski Middle School! In the class we play games, think critically about those games, and then use an iterative design process to make fun and interesting modifications of those games! I begin the class with Tic Tac Toe, teach them the optimal strategy, and let them quickly realize that the game is dull when everyone is playing optimally and every game ends in a tie. Students are then tasked with making Tic Tac Toe interesting again by incorporating elements of luck (dice, cards), skill (bottle flipping, bean bag toss), or increasing the complexity to deepen the strategic decision making (larger board, new rules). We go on to explore strategy games, card games, dice games, knowledge games, and social games with students developing their own versions of each.
In this workshop we will go through a quickened version of this process and design our own versions of a card game called Golf!
