Making Games With Game Maker: A Computational Thinking Curriculum Case Study

While advances in game-based learning are already transforming educative practices globally, with tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and Google taking notice and investing in educational game initiatives, there is a concurrent and critically important development that focuses on 'game construction' pedagogy as a vehicle for enhancing computational literacy in middle and high school students. Essentially, game construction-based curriculum takes the central question "do children learn from playing games" to the next stage by asking "(what) can children learn from constructing games?" Founded on Seymour Papert's constructionist learning model, and developed over nearly 2 decades, there is compelling evidence that game construction can increase confidence and build capacity towards ongoing computing science involvement and other STEM subjects. Situated at the intersection of 'maker' pedagogies and inquiry-based learning on one hand and game-based learning on the other, this field of educational research is just now more thoroughly being theorized and implemented. There is still debate as to the utility of different software tools for game construction, models of scaffolding knowledge, and evaluation of learning outcomes and knowledge transfer. In this paper, we present a study we conducted in a classroom environment with three groups of grade 6 students (60+ students) using Game Maker to construct their own games. Our study adds to the growing body of literature on school-based game construction through comprehensive empirical methodology and evidence-based guidelines for curriculum design. We also discuss preliminary results related to computational literacy, in addition to a theorization of game construction as an educational tool that directly engages foundational literacy and numeracy and connects to wider STEM-oriented learning objectives.