Gregory Trefry

Making games for kids ain’t easy, but it sure can be rewarding. Kids can be the harshest of critics and also the most appreciative of players.

Designing a game entails crafting a complex and dynamic system to produce engagement. Designing games for kids demands that you do all of that and make it look super simple. No 20 page booklets of rules. No relying on the good will of the player to hold their attention. Stir in the reality that a 4-­‐year old is radically different from a 7-­‐year old and you’ve got a formidable, but exciting design challenge in front of you.

Designing games for kids forces you to strip your games down to their essence honing your skills as an interaction designer. This class will lay out a basic framework for game design. Then we’ll use that framework to analyze and design games for different age ranges, skill levels and attention spans. We will also look at the interplay between games and education, focusing on ways to draw out learning through scaffolding. The class will focus heavily on production and playtesting. Students will make a series of games for different age ranges. They will also create curricular materials that scaffold one of their games to draw out elements of learning.