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Video Game Design

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video game design

Go from gamer to designer. Kids love playing video games, but they have even more fun playing games designed by them and their friends! One of Empow Studios’ most popular classes, Video Game Design, encompasses storytelling, pixel art, and object-oriented programming, all through a user-friendly 2D game design platform. Our non-violence policy keeps the games cringe-free and sharable once the kids bring their games home for you to play!

Students learn the fundamentals of object-oriented programming through video game design while creating their own game. Don't tell the kids, but while creating the games, they will be learning math, geometry, design, logic, and object-oriented programming. Games can be played at home (MS Windows-only), and software used in class is available for download (MAC and PC) for those who want to continue working on their games at home.

Goals and Objectives: 
- Demonstrate understanding of the concepts of events and actions
- Demonstrate understanding of the relationship between objects and sprites or their application equivalents
- Understand options for different types of games and perspectives used in 2D game design
- Understanding and working with timing in a game
- More text based coding- If... Else/Switch statements
- Animating sprites and programming with image variables
- Programming things to have some level of artificial intelligence 

Click for more information: Empow Studios


About the Instructor
Martin McDonald is a professional digital artist withe experience working on video games, TV shows, and film. He primarily focuses in character animation in both 2D and 3D. He graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a degree in Animation and is a Massachusetts Licensed Teacher in Visual Arts. He finds great joy in learning all he can and teaching others all they want to know to help them better turn their dreams into reality. He has an entire library of random bit of interesting information from a wide variety of different subjects such as History, Science, Math, and Linguistics.

About Empow Studios
Empow Studios brings technology, arts, and play together to help young learners discover and build on their creative talents.

It’s a well-known belief that the need for specialized skills in technology and computer science are ever-growing. Our goal is to empower kids to create projects that they are proud to share with family & friends. Whether that's designing, building, coding, or a combination of all three, every kid should have the opportunity to learn the empowering tools within digital art, computer science, and engineering, which can potentially spark interests for future ambitions in STEM.

Empow’s learning philosophy based on creative play borrows from John Dewey’s instrumentalism, Piaget’s constructivism, and Papert’s constructionism in asserting that passions, perceptions, and experience play a crucial role in how a person builds and maintains his or her understanding of the world. Even in the supposedly coldly rational world of STEM, love and play drive learning. They are what makes our lives meaningful, worthwhile, and fun. That’s where we start.

Today, much of that creative play (and future work) takes place in digital, virtual, and robotic environments. Empow Studios supports not only active participation and developing literacy in that playground, but also self-efficacy and creativity. Empowering kids means giving them the tools not only to navigate their future landscapes, but be active and intentional creators of it.

What do you want to MAKE today?

* Adjustments and discounts will be applied during checkout if applicable. *

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