Tag Archives: scratch

Panel: Designing Digital Play for Well-Being at Games for Change 2023 July 18, 2023 at 1:45pm The Times Center | Main Stage How do we define well-being in a digital world and what does it mean to thrive? How can developers incorporate diverse perspectives into game design to benefit players from different backgrounds around the world? How can we balance responsible design with business pressures? How can we empower game designers to embed designing for well-being and digital thriving into…

For the fourth part of this series, we asked experts to focus their predictions on digital play by answering the question, “How will the way children play with digital media change in the coming months and/or years as a result of the coronavirus pandemic?” Creativity, community, and kindness Mitchel Resnick, PhD, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, is author of the book Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play. On March 18, 2020, a…

Teammates Calvin Khiddee-Wu, 14, and Jagdeep Bhatia, 14, of Green Brook, New Jersey knew from the start that they wanted to design a video game with an apocalyptic setting, and ultimately decided to use their game to tell a story of survival in the wake of nuclear fallout. Their original video game design, Reconstruct, won the Middle School Team Open Platform category of the 2016 National STEM Video Game Challenge after they were encourage to enter the competition by their…

Since the age of 11, Aventura, Florida resident Samson Simhon, now 15, has been fascinated with game design. After mastering the basics of the Scratch platform, he taught himself increasingly complex code that allowed for 3D visual effects and advanced game mechanics. “I’ve created over thirty different projects,” says Samson, “including an iOS app called Jealous Bird.” Samson’s game design Prism won the High School Scratch category of the 2016 National STEM Video Game Challenge. Prism is an updated take…

Thanks to early exposure to robotics and Scratch in elementary school, 14-year-old Georgia Martinez of Chicago, Illinois is now an avid game developer. “I was immediately hooked,” she explains. Georgia’s game, Fractured Forest, won the Middle School Scratch category of the 2016 National STEM Video Game Challenge. In Fractured Forest, players search for resources and battle monsters as they navigate 20 floors of colorful gameplay. Georgia’s other hobbies include playing euphonium and piano, and her favorite subject in school is…

“Ugh! I hate coding!” cried out one of my seventh-grade students. “I don’t see why I have to move Elsa three spaces to meet Anna. It’s soooo boring!” “But with Twine you are coding,” I explained. “I guess,” she responded, unenthusiastically. The above conversation was an actual exchange I had with a student in my social studies class this past school year. She was referencing an Hour of Code activity she was assigned to complete for another class. In it,…

Matthew Bellavia, 14, is a long-time player of console and PC games, so it was a natural fit when he started learning programming back in sixth grade. After experimenting with building basic games in Scratch, the Sammamish, Washington-native started using GameMaker as a way to combine a drag-and-drop interface with the ability to develop new code as a way to generate more complex games. Utilizing his knowledge of geometry and physics, his video game Gravity Galaxy won the Middle School Gamemaker…

As an active member of the Boys and Girls Club, 14-year-old Sanja Kirova got her start in video game design through the Game Tech and Hour of Code programs at her local club in Merrillville, Indiana. After learning about the design process and the logic behind programming, she decided to combine her three primary interests—reading, drawing, and math—and develop a video game concept of her own using Scratch. In 2014, she was named the national winner in the Game Design category…

Like most 13 year old boys, Cole Nutgeren has diverse hobbies and interests, like playing the piano and fencing. But unlike many kids his age, he takes a systems thinking approach to everything he does and likes to think about the building blocks that make these systems run. It is this approach that helped him design the Best Middle School Scratch game for the 2015 National STEM Video Game Challenge award. Cole was immediately hooked on Scratch when a friend…

He called himself MechaStayPuft. That was the username and avatar he would use across all of the game design platforms we used. It struck me as an odd choice for a teenager, a compound reference to Ghostbusters, which turned 30 this past June, and Gozilla vs. MechaGodzilla, which predates Ghostbusters by a decade. How did a student who couldn’t have been born before the Clinton administration be acquainted with two relics of 70s and 80s counterculture? Regrettably, I never found…