1. Is this an active forum?

2. Can I get pedagogical support here?

1. If you had looked at the posts, you would have seen that their dates are very recent. Several dated today, yesterday, the day before... So yes, it's active.

2. This is a game design forum. We don't have any teaching-oriented forums. But I'm game. What aspects of game design do you want to teach? Do you have experience designing games yourself?

I have been told that game salad, scratch and unity are all free and (I assume) relatively easy to learn and use.

Those are not Game Design. Those are game creation tools. If you want to teach those, learn how to use them first. Sounds like you are a Mac guy (as opposed to Windows), but that's normal for artists.

To teach Game Design, most people start with analysis of existing games - board games, card games, video games. Board game design is usually used next, to teach principles of play. If you want to find educators to talk to, I recommend going to igda.org and joining the game education SIG. This is probably the wrong website for you. I'll probably need to move this thread to the GDNet Lounge, since you are not actually asking about game design but rather education from an educators' POV.

You shouldn't have to be an IGDA member to join the SIG. Try googling igda education sig.

I am an art teacher who plans to teach it from a design-oriented aesthetics perspective.

hmm... tough. as in sounds like a bit of a challenge.

much of game art is about reigning in the artist's creativity to the limitations of the medium. and those limitations can sometimes be shocking to the uninitiated.

Game 'design' versus coding (getting bogged down in details when you want broad understanding...)

You can have use of a few tools like a 2D editor as an example to create a texture and have a prerigged display of it to get an introduction to the idea of simple assets. Present the more complex assets (how 3D bone animation is done, even rotoscoping to get the flowing data needed for animations)

Story Boarding as the 'art' approach (freehand drawing to illustrate ideas)

Introduce the basics of what a 'game ' is : what the player does, what the program must do, flow of the interaction between those two.

Basic operation of multiple players (ie- taking inputs from player(s), resolving the interactions, displaying to the players the results... what data flows back and forth peer vs client(s)+server operations.

Spectrum of different game types and intents abstract vs realistic, fun vs competition, etc....

A few points:

• Game development is a huge subject. If you want to talk about it, be prepared to either provide an extremely broad-yet-shallow overview, or to dive into a very limited subset of the total field. If you do the latter, be very upfront with your students about what they will be covering in your curriculum, or there will inevitably be loud disappointment.

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