By Lizzie Murchison | Program Manager for Communications
On behalf of the Global Kids youth leaders and staff, we would like to thank you for supporting Global Kids’ Playing for Keeps summer program. The program was exhilarating and your support helped make it a huge success. Our students were extremely proud to demonstrate the video games that they created and to show off their knowledge of environmental issues.
Approximately 20 youth took part in this year’s Playing for Keeps program. Students used MIT's open source video game design software, Scratch, to program and design games about environmental issues. The program was offered in two sessions, one for middle school students and one for high school students. Each program offered a varied array of hands-on activities that exposed students to the principles of game design.
On the first day of the program, the students learned to name the core elements of a game by identifying those elements in classic games such as Rock, Paper, Scissors. They chose specific elements of a game that they wanted to change, and noticed how their decisions affected game play. Next, they used objects they found in their homes to create board games, integrating what they learned about strong game design. The group spoke about socially conscious games before breaking into groups based on the environmental issue they were most interested in raising awareness about. When it came time to program their games, many of the groups elected to assign tasks to individual students such as script writing, art design, coding, and playtesting. They forged new friendships and at the end of the week, they beamed with pride as they presented their games back to the group.
At Global Kids, we will continue to find ways to deepen and further the learning that began in the Playing for Keeps summer program. We will continue to provide young people the space to take action via digital media. We hope you will continue to support the work of our youth and will look to us as partners in your efforts to provide engaging educational opportunities for young people.
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