Rob Dieterich - Student-Developers and Teacher-Publishers: A Model for Project-based Learning
Rob Dieterich, Skyboy Games
This presentation was given at the 2017 Serious Play Conference, hosted by the George Mason University - Virginia Serious Play Institute.
This presenter will outline a typical developer-publisher relationship in the entertainment games industry including a typical milestone schedule. He then describes how this relationship was applied to successfully teach game development and project management skills to high-school students in a two-week intensive summer class. In a partnership between Mason Game & Technology Academy (MGTA) and Envision Experience, the presenter and several others taught hands-on 3D game development skills to high-school students during the summer of 2016. By adopting a model that emulates the relationship between publishers and developers in the entertainment games industry, the teachers were able to maintain a high level of student engagement while mentoring them in the skills they need to develop their own computer games.
Acting in the role of publishers, the teachers had their students divide into small teams that were responsible for conceiving, pitching, and developing projects of their own design. Through a series of milestone checks modeled on a typical publisher-developer relationship in the entertainment games industry, the teachers were able to guide the students' efforts to maximize their ability to finish their projects within the allotted time.
The aspirational quality of the game developer role-play inherent in the relationship between the publishers (teachers) and the developers (students) helped keep the students motivated during class. Because the students conceived the projects themselves, they were further motivated to complete them and most groups self-managed effectively as a result. This self-management freed the teachers to concentrate on helping the student groups with the particular game development needs of their projects.
This talk presents this developer-publisher model as a method to organize a project-based game development curriculum and describes the effectiveness of its application in the MGTA/Envision summer program.
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