Alternative Games

In addition to mainstream games and indy games, like the games designed by girls, a number of designing tools, including new ways to learn programming are in production. Many are aimed at interesting atypical programmers. Projects like Mary Flanagan’s Rapunsel Project, which aims to build a software environment to teach programming concepts to kids. Similarly, Carnegie Mellon University’s Alice Project aims “to provide the best possible first exposure to programming for students ranging from middle schoolers to college students.” Alice seems to be doing quite well, especially with one textbook already out and another set to come out later this year.

Loads of other projects (including earlier versions of Alice) have been around for years, like Logo and Carnegie Mellon has a host of older and newer projects that can be used in teaching and in learning about games. Games that teach and games that inspire learning beg for additional building tools and games that allow others to then build more games and these are just a few of the projects that help create building blocks for educational games.

The third annual ChicTech Retreat (pronounced ’sheek-tek’) was held April 22-23, 2006 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ChicTech is an outreach program created by the UIUC Department of Computer Science, and the Retreat is the annual culmination of a year-long high school program serving 300 of Illinois’ teenage girls. The ChicTech program and accompanying Technical Ambassador Competition are designed to encourage girls to consider math and science as legitimate career and personal interests. This year’s competition winners were a team from Plainfield South High School who created a stats package for the boys’ bowling team, but several teams received recognition for their projects.

The thirty (female) winners from the Technical Ambassador Competition attended the 2006 ChicTech Retreat where they served as live, teenage judges for the 2006 Games 4 Girls (G4G) Competition. The G4G Competition is open to any group of female game developers currently enrolled in a college or university. Twenty-three teams entered the competition, although only eight managed to finish their game projects. Judging is split between the ChicTech girls and a panel of actual game developers.

Of the eight entrants, four were noted for honors. These include teams from Cornell, UC Irvine, North Central College and the University at Buffalo. Each team created a small game in Game Maker, a well-known authoring system developed to teach game design concepts in courses to students with a wide variety of backgrounds. All of these games are playable on standard Windows XP-based machines and withstood the gameplay testing of 30 high school girls as well as two professional game designers and a representative from last year’s winning G4G team.

Continue reading ‘Games 4 Girls Winners Online (Boys can play, too.)’