Game Design

September 12 - October 23, 2016

In this 6 week afterschool program kids, ages 5 - 12, invented and made games out of scrap wood and recyclables. Games included Extreme Skee-ball, Presidential Darts, the Leaf Dumper and more. On October 23, 2016 friends and families attended a game carnival at Knoll Farm to celebrate and play the games.

Session 1: Clown Blaster

September 12, 2016

Blast the Clown is a classic carnival game where players throw balls to knock out the teeth on a clown head. As an introductory project, kids were asked to build their own versions of the classic game using scrap wood, tennis balls, and hinges.

Session 2: Design

SEPTEMBER 20, 2016

To begin the second week, students participated in a design session to begin planning their own ideas for games. After making sketches and sorting through materials, they were set-free to carry out their visions. Ripley and Amha, pictured below, set their minds to making an oversized version of skee-ball. Other kids experimented with pulleys to smash rotten pumpkins.

Session 3: Skee-ball Ramp

September 26, 2016

Week 3 saw the progression of the Extreme Skee-ball project, as well as the invention of Presidential Darts - a White House dart board with the presidential nominees peering through the windows.

Session 4: Kid Spinner

October 3, 2016

Students continued developing their projects in preparation for the game carnival event at the end of the month. Quinn worked on assembling his kid spinner by attaching castor wheels to the back of a target from an old game. He secured an aluminum backpack frame onto the board with steel clamps and screws to make his game rideable.

Session 5: Carnival Prep

October 17, 2016

With the game carnival less the 1 week away, the kids put the finishing touches onto their games. Quinn set-up the kid spinner by the Extreme Skeeball tower. His game constitutes climbing up the tower and trying to throw marshmallows into buckets attached to the Kid Spinner. The rules are as follows: if you make it into the bucket you get to eat the marshmallow - if you miss the dizzy kid gets to eat it.