Good Practice - Case Study

Kings Langley Secondary School

School No: 902

Games Development - An Integrated Year 9 project

Modelling does not come easily for many students. The concepts are much too abstract. You ask them to work out how much profit they will make if they buy roses for 50p each and sell 20 for 90p.  The majority of my students will have no problem in giving the right answer. Teaching and learning becomes more challenging when you ask students to translate the simple calculation into (A2-A1)*B3. There had to be a better way of covering modelling.  I was shown Klik & Play* by Jonathan Dobres (secondary ICT advisor) and instantly saw the potential.

The first thing was that developing a game could be used as a carrot to entice and entertain the year 9 students.  Developing a game could be used as a way of encouraging independent learning.  “Here is a simple game, find out how it works and produce your own version.”  This approach has been successful, as many students have come to use the IT facilities during lunch time to work on their game production.  Some students have also downloaded the free program* to use at home.  Creating a game gives the opportunity for sharing knowledge. I have learnt many techniques from the students because most of them are more than willing to pass on the skills that they have learnt.

The students, initially, thought that they could make games similar to the games that they buy. I had to point out that the program that we are using is free* and they won’t make a new GTA.

We had to consider a more realistic target i.e.  To ‘model’ approximations to more sophisticated games (by actually creating the approximations as prototype games) much as spreadsheet modelling might create successively more realistic financial models for a disco. Games creation embodies aspects of both control and modelling as defined by the national curriculum. Control in that game rules are converted to ‘sequences of instructions’ for a purpose and modelling in that rules and variables of the game are ‘varied’ to ‘explore and test predictions’. A student might for example predict that by increasing the number of obstacles in a game, the game might take twice as long to complete on average –this prediction can easily be tested.

The development of the game is only part of the whole project, the nice reward. In the project that I have set out below almost all aspects of the National Curriculum are covered.

Students have to produce a game that will then be sent to developers for editing and the production of the final production version.  At each stage reports have to be written (evaluation by another name).

The game development is seeded throughout the unit, so as not to bore the students by doing the same thing for too long.

They also have to work out the financial viability of promoting the game at an exhibition and produce the audio-visual materials

*Klik&Play is no longer available but has been upgraded to TGF2 .TGF2 works in the same way as Klik&Play (and the original games factory), but is far more powerful
For details of TGF2 go to the Clickteam website

• www.clickteam.com

SOW and Assessment

The SOW and assessment criteria for the project is in the full case study below:

Download the full printable version case study:

• kings_langley_games.pdf (Acrobat pdf/1.55mb)