5 Tips on Designing Your Own Classroom Games

tl;dr: It is easier than ever to build a simple game to add engagement to your classroom. Here are a few tips that can help you success along that path.

Games make classrooms livelier and engage students. Games challenge students to apply their knowledge, and in doing so, give them a safe space to fail. Chances are, you already knew that. However, what you might not realize is just how easy it can be to bring your own game ideas to life. This article will share a bit about our approach to design and development, how generative Ai is changing how we prototype, and the reasons why we believe that building a successful game to complement your lecture is easier than you think. 

#1 Focus on a single teaching point 

From our experience, the hardest thing to do for any instructor is to do less. It’s easy to get caught up capturing every detail of the scenario you wish to teach.  Games are meant to be abstractions, meaning they aren’t supposed to capture everything – just the things that matter.  Not to mention that the more targeted a game is, the easier they are to build and eventually explain to new players. This is why we believe that constraints can actually help you remain creative and reasonable. To this end, try asking questions like: “If I only had 5 minutes to teach this, what would I focus on?”, or “Can I break this teaching point into smaller parts?”. Hopefully this will reduce your scope and make it easier to build from there.

#2 Make student decisions align with the teaching point

One great thing about games is that your decisions matter. Unlike static stories, players determine the path from point A to B. We’ve written about how this uncertainty is fundamental in making these learning experiences interesting and memorable (link to article), but it’s also critical to ensure that player decisions are teaching point focused. When building a process optimization game, players have to deploy additional resources based on their ability to identify the capacity bottleneck in the recycling plant they operate. Similarly, when building a game about optimization math, we tasked players with selecting which products to profile in an e-commerce website based on a sales estimate calculation (game link). In every exercise we build, each decision is tied to the core teaching point and that helps cull the number of decisions as well.

#3 Context is icing on the cake

Now that you have decision dynamics tied to a narrow teaching point, think about what an appropriate context could be. This is where you can really let your creativity fly.  We chose to focus on food trucks when building a game about wait times and line management. For a game about implicit bias, we put students in the shoes of hiring managers at a fast growing start-up (game link). To determine the best context for your game, think about what common (or uncommon) scenarios exist in which the teaching point plays a central role. This will add realism and give students the feeling that they are learning by doing. 

#4 Prototype with generative Ai

When the first version of this article was posted in 2019, the preferred early prototyping method was paper and pencil. That works great for in-person board game ideas, and it’s ok for testing software ideas if you provide enough context. Yet since then, software like Figma has flourished to help create clickable prototypes that are great for creating more realistic play-tests for software-based game concepts. However, the ability to rapidly create and test game concepts has been radically accelerated by advances in generative ai. We have been experimenting with Anthropic’s artifacts feature to create fully functional prototypes in minutes instead of hours or days. Now, by describing a game’s context, decisions, and feedback, you can generate a working prototype without typing a single line of code. 

#5 Your game will evolve. Go with it!

Regardless of the design approach, many instructors may still be hesitant to deploy their own game in the classroom because they’ve “never played it before” or “they don’t know if it’s good enough.”  These can be easily dispelled by playing it beforehand with peers. There may be bugs, and certainly challenges to overcome, but it is important to view these as part of the process. The same can be said for the first few deployments. Try asking students to volunteer to play a ‘prototype’. This will provide a deep well of target-user feedback, and we find that student-volunteers are eager to contribute their comments and suggestions. Ultimately, if you can adapt to the feedback, resolve the challenges, and perhaps even check this suggestion-list for potential solutions, we think that you’ll soon have more games than space in your syllabus!

We understand that this process does not contemplate the entire process of building and releasing a scalable educational game. Scaling requires deployment, distribution, support, and a host of other things that are important – but only after a game idea has been proven. Still, we think the design principles we’ve described can help intrepid educators create game experiences that students can use on a small scale and still benefit from. We hope that we have helped you in your design process, or simply motivated you to try your hand at game building. In any case, if you have built a game you think can scale, we’d like to hear from you ([email protected])! 

This blog was originally posted on 01 August 2019.