Move over, Mario: kids at UF summer camp creating their own video games
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For a whole generation of American kids, summer was a time to pick up a joystick and start blasting aliens, gobbling ghosts and leaping over barrels.
In an innovative summer camp at the University of Florida’s College of Education, elementary-age children are learning to create their own video games. And they’re making games that put Dad’s old Atari 2600 to shame.
Graduate students are teaching children in grades 3-6 how to make their own video games in the College of Education’s Digital Kids Tech Camp.
Digital Kids Tech Camp at UF is a one-week “crash course” in which approximately two dozen third- through- sixth-graders learn to use the latest digital construction tools to create and beta-test a whole arcade’s worth of video games. Available for free download at http://www.digitalkidstechcamp.org/, the kids’ creations include old-school shoot-em-ups and Pac-man mimics that hark back to the classic video games of the 1980s.
There’s more to the camp than just video games, says camp director Jeff Boyer.
“Creating a video game is actually a very challenging task,” said Boyer, a doctoral student in UF’s educational technology program. “It pushes kids to use a number of higher-order thinking skills—problem-solving, communication and working in groups.”
In the camp, students spend four hours per day in one-on-one instruction with graduate students as they learn to use Web 2.0 tools such as Scratch, GameMaker and Stick Figure Animator. Boyer and his colleagues tout the camp as a tool for teaching “21st Century skills” and “technological fluency.” While those phrases call up the image of a worker interacting with computers, Boyer notes that our high-tech society requires much more than just mouse clicks.
“They’re learning to be successful in a fluid environment,” Boyer said. “They’re learning to create products for an audience, which is something they often don’t experience in school, where they usually have an audience of one—the teacher.”
To become part of that audience, visit http://www.digitalkidstechcamp.org/, and click “Kid’s Creations” for a selection of downloadable, kid-created games. Many of the tools used in the camp, such as the computer animation programs Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) and Stick Figure Animator (http://www.snapfiles.com/GeT/sTiCkFiGuRe.html), are available for free on the Internet, for parents and children who want to create video games at home.
