Lessons Learned From Teaching Game Design
Lessons Learned From Teaching Game Design
Lessons Learned From Teaching Game Design
By Lars Kalthoff
February 16, 2021
Summary
I've spent the past six months teaching game design at the Cologne Game Lab, a German institute dedicated to the study of digital games.
In this blog post, I want to share what I've learned during the process and condense it down into five practical rules you can apply to improve your own teaching.
Fifth-semester students at the Cologne Game Lab get the chance to propose a self-initiated project and work on it for a whole semester under the supervision of a professor.
There are no lectures or assignments during this time and students are free to choose any subject for their project as long as it's related to digital games in some way.
For my own self-initiated project, I've decided to learn more about teaching and put it into practice at the Cologne Game Lab.
Originally, the goal was to develop and teach a single three-hour session on a game design topic.
The rest of the project time would be spent on research, mainly focusing on the literature on learning from cognitive science.
Things turned out a little bit differently.
I ended up with four sessions on wildly different subjects: The first one was a two-hour workshop on narrative design for aspiring game developers from Sudan.
I took the famous fantasy series Game of Thrones as an example to derive practical advice on writing characters, developing them, and presenting them to the audience.
Reference
Kalthoff, L. (2021, February 16). Lessons Learned From Teaching Game Design. Gamasutra. https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsKalthoff/20210216/377425/Lessons_Learned_From_Teaching_Game_Design.php.