Like a technology camp, Extracurricular activities benefit children by exposing them to skills beyond academics, applying what they learn at school in a different context or environment, and developing them as well-rounded young adults. In addition, they socialize and make new friends while exploring new areas of interest and broadening their perspectives.
Here we explore what real-world skills your child will learn if s/he enrolls for a game development technology camp.
Developing games is an intense, collaborative, and multidisciplinary activity, taking the developer through the planning, designing, coding, and testing stages. Creating a game touches upon various abilities and interests, from programming logic to artistic design and narrative writing.
Because one person rarely excels at all these things, a game development camp becomes an excellent opportunity to work on team-building. Additionally, budding gamers will spend a lot of time practicing communication and collaboration! Here is a bit more detail on some of the ways we see campers honing their abilities at technology camp:
Imagine and plan
Developing games is a creative endeavor, and your child will primarily learn to translate their ideas by creating a storyboard. Putting your imagination to paper helps to spot the gaps in the idea and, in turn, solidifies the gameplay.
Code
Problem-solving
While building the game at technology camp, kids will encounter many problems like the code not working, not understanding some parts of the code, complexities of developing an algorithm, etc. Then, thinking creatively to solve these problems, they’ll brainstorm to create a solution that works.
Adapting to Feedback
The experience of the users is key to the success of the game. Ensuring the game players have a fun and engaging experience, kids will have to carefully plan the game experience, its rules, structure, levels, and score system. During this, they will have to give the game to other users, observe them and take their feedback. Feedback comes with many different suggestions. Kids will need to consider everyone’s input and learn to exercise judgment on what will ultimately be in the final game. This is excellent preparation for their daily lives as adults and a fantastic exercise in empathy.
Communication and presentation
Every child needs to present their game, how it works, how they built it, and how they overcame challenges. Working as a team, they also plan their presentations and make sure that all contributions in the group are recognized. Doing this in a technology camp reinforces a lot of the lessons from school about collaboration and citizenship.
Learning to develop games is a wonderful technical, artistic, and creative endeavor. There is no denying the connection that kids have with games, the prominence of the gaming industry or its implications for their future careers. Most importantly, however, attending a game development camp is a fantastic opportunity for children to deepen their passion. Lifting the lid on how games are created, take their communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and empathy to a new level while making friends and having a great time at technology camp.
If your students have attended a game development technology camp, let us know! We would love to feature their creations on social media. You can share by using the hashtags #BuildSomethingDifferent or #BSDEducation
Check out this link to a great 2D runner game from another technology camp that Matthew built from Sha Tin College on BSD’s Online platform to get started: https://app.bsd.education/share/4W4efS37/.
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