How to Create Your Own Game Course for Kids

Why your kids should take this course?

Let's turn those hours spent playing games into valuable learning opportunities! As your child creates exciting digital worlds, they will master the skills that top tech companies and innovative businesses desperately seek.

Course Description:

In this choose-your-own-journey style nano, students will build their own platformer video game alongside the instructor. The course will cover various mechanics and gameplay systems that students can choose from based on what fits their game concept best. Students will do all the ideating, artwork, coding, and world-building with the instructor’s example game as a guide. At the end of the course, they will have brought their unique game idea to life while learning coding and game design concepts that can be used to build more and more games. The final product will be an online video game easily shared with family and friends.

Course Structure:

Unit 1

1. Meet Your Teacher
2. What is Game Design & Why Learn It

Unit 2

1. What Kind of Game Will We Make
2. Intro to MakeCode Arcade
3. Planning Out Your Game
4. Saving Our Project

Unit 3

1. Character Sprite
2. Game Background Art
3. Testing Tilemap
4. Character Movement
5. X and Y in MakeCode Arcade
6. Walls

Unit 4

1. Coding the Character Controller.
2. Character Animations
3. Single Jump
4. Jump Animation
5. Add a Double Jump (optional)
6. Character Lives
7. Character Attack Combat
8. Character Attack Shooting
   

Unit 5

1. Spawn Points

What will the student learn?

• How to make a video game
• How to code with blocks
• How to build platformer game mechanics and systems (ex, powerups, special abilities)
• Game/Level Design
• Basic pixel art and animation

Is this Learning Experience fun? Why?

Yes! You get to take your idea and turn it into a video game. While building the game, you will also play and playtest it often!

More about the Instructor

Kristen Montesano is a professional game developer and software engineer with a teaching and curriculum development background. She received her Bachelor of Science in Child Learning and Development from the University of Texas at Dallas, a tier-one research-focused university, and resides in Denver, Colorado. Kristen is a self-taught developer and Circuit Stream Certified XR Practitioner.