Gamers in Training: Global Kids hosts games-based training for educators, librarians

Give a kid a joystick, and she’s occupied for a day. Teach her how to create her own video game, and she’s a learner for life. That’s the goal of Global Kids and its games-based educational training sessions, which the New York-based nonprofit kicked off in early December 2009.

Increasingly, educators see game design as a gateway to other disciplines, and the literacy skills developed through creating video games can enhance the learning process overall. That’s prompted Global Kids to sponsor game-design training at various institutions, including branches of the New York Public Library. Now, the organization is opening its classes to anyone who works with children, so individuals can get up to speed on using game development in an educational setting.

Teens play social issue games at a Global Kids’ session in April 2009.

That’s what New York library media specialist Christy Crawford had hoped to discover—a way to engage her older elementary school students at P.S. 51 in the Bronx, beyond what she calls, “basic skills and drills.” Her specific goal? To direct her fourth and fifth graders in designing video games, which the younger students in the school can, in turn, use. “When you teach other people, you strengthen 90 percent of what you know,” says Crawford of the potential for cross-grade synergy.

Having attended a December 4 training session at the Global Kids office in Manhattan, Crawford found it heavy on theory, with not as much actual game design as she would have liked. Still she walked away with some new tools, including Scratch, the kid-centered program developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. A free download, Scratch offers basic building blocks for simple video game design.

“The biggest, most amazing thing is creating a game yourself,” says Crawford. “When I asked my students what they wanted to do this year, they asked for that again and again.”

Crawford’s students are hardly alone. At ImaginOn, a joint venture of the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County and the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte (NC), students fill up the game design classes before all others, says Kelly Czarnecki, ImaginOn’s technology education librarian.

To better serve her game-hungry youth patrons, Czarnecki recently traveled to New York to take a Global Kids’ class, looking to integrate serious subjects, from terrorism to homelessness, into her work. Like Santo, Czarnecki sees game design fostering literacy skills in many different subjects. “In game design you’re making 'if’ and 'then’ statements by putting commands together,” she says. “I definitely see literacy skills inherent in those programs.”

So does Crawford, who believes that if her students excel at game design they can apply those lessons throughout their educational career. “Gaming literacy is just a matter of breaking down the problem into little pieces,” she says. “And you can apply that to everything from math to art.”