Learning & Leading Through Technology

Designing games develops many other valuable skills, such as writing in a clear and concise way. Games have rules and objectives, and students must describe the narrative and rules succinctly, just like commercial board games, which usually print the rules on the back of the box.

This type of project also requires students to develop planning and organization skills. They must choose whether their games will be completely contained within a PowerPoint file, or whether they will include game boards, scorecards, dice, and game pieces. If an external game board is required, students will need to paste images of the game board on slides with directions to print those slides before the game begins.

Leveling Up the Games

Over a three-year period, we taught game design to students in grades

10–12 in a science classroom at Clarkston High School in Clarkston, Michigan, USA. The course, Environmental Chemistry, was based on the American Chemical Society’s Chemistry in the Community curriculum ( often called ChemCom). Over the course of the school year, students created games during two of the seven units in the course. The units lasted approximately one month each, and we created games for a unit on the earth’s resources and the periodic table as well as a unit on the atmosphere and gas laws. We made improvements to the implementation of the project each year. Here’s a list of lesson tips and lessons learned to help you implement PowerPoint games to teach content:

Many students love everything about video games, so teach- ing them to use technology to design their own games around content is an assignment that can offer built-in engagement. The problem, however, is that teachers often don’t have the time or expertise to teach computer programming, let alone content and process skills. On top of that, installing game design software can create friction between the teaching staff and technology department.

That’s where Microsoft PowerPoint comes in. Did you know you can help your students create—from scratch or from a template—a video game using PowerPoint?

Although PowerPoint is not a true
programming platform, there are
elements of computational thinking
in the design of a homemade Power-
Point game. Linking a story to ques-
tions, creating and debugging mul-
tiple and nonlinear paths of the slides,
and creating a logical flow to a game
(checkpoints, increased difficulty,
etc.) are all tasks that are complex,
open ended, and ambiguous, and
that require persistence, especially
in the debugging process.
A game design project also meets
the ISTE Standards for Students.
After all, the game itself is a creative
endeavor where groups of students
build artifacts that demonstrate con-
tent knowledge in a novel format
(Standard 1). This is especially true
when designing a game using a plat-
form that has limitations, such as
PowerPoint. The same justifications
for computational thinking are simi-
lar to Standard 4 (critical thinking,
problem solving, decision making).
In most games, players must achieve
a goal by correctly answering a series
of multiple-choice questions. Each
choice is an action button that sends
players to a slide indicating whether
their answer was correct or incorrect.
Action buttons send the players to a
predetermined
slide rather
than the next
slide in the
deck. There-
fore, the novel
use of PowerPoint
(learning about
and applying the
action button fea-
ture) and trouble-
shooting aspects
of the game design
project align with
Standard 6 (tech-
nology operations
and concepts).