The design cycle in action:

Surprise! I (your teacher) am the owner of EA (Electronic Arts) one of the world’s biggest game development studios. EA wants to design a new game – an educational game for kids 8-12 years old with a memorable, marketable character.

You (the students) will be divided into roughly even sized, manageable groups.

Discovery

Each group should come up with questions to ask me to help determine their plan.

Examples might be: does it matter what type of genre? Do you want certain colors? How expensive should it be? Does it matter if the main character is a boy, girl, animal or something made up? How difficult should it be?

After a few minutes, each group will be allowed to ask me questions. Each group should take notes on the questions and answers.  After all questions are answered, each group will come up with a complete plan for their game.

Design

After you have received information from the discovery phase, groups will plan and design the character & game on paper.

The design should include a description of the game (puzzles, adventure, mazes, etc.), a description of the main character and other objects or characters and the goal of the game. And of course include anything else they may have learned from the discovery questions like color preferences, etc.

Groups can draw pictures, use text or a combination to come up with their plan.

Groups will evaluate their plan against the info they have received from the discovery phase – are they hitting everything you need them to do? Are they on track to build an educational game for 8-12 year olds with a memorable character?

Develop

Think about the types of tasks that will need to be done to build your game.

Each group will list the jobs and tasks that will be necessary to build this game.This should include jobs like: programming, graphics, sound effects, voice over recordings (if needed), writing instructions, project manager, customer support, etc.

Evaluate your team and plan. Is every task listed? Will this produce the game you want?

Deliver

Groups should have their idea, have the tasks assigned, have been evaluating all along now have they will deliver their game.

Groups will present their game & character concept to the class, they will describe what types of jobs would need to be done and how they see their game being actually used – in schools, online, Play Station or WII – and why.