I’ve been worrying that I’ve not got enough notes/materials behind the work I’m doing on Neverwinter Nights. The pupils are not getting notes or getting long tutorials on the application.

I started pupils off with Neverwinter Nights today by asking them what makes a good game. We talked about what was good and what was rubbish in games today. We talked about what kinds of things you get in fantasy games (wizards and castles etc). Then we went on the computers.

I treated the learning at this point like an administrative task. I gave the pupils enough knowledge to get them to create worlds with creatures and objects and different terrain, and asked them to experiment. I set up a question board using a wee bit of php, which allowed pupils to post up a question onto a projected screen. The questions will be used to build the next lesson - pupil directed learning, I think, is the best way. Why teach them how to make different levels of spells, or use keys, if they first want to do so many other things (mainly involving fire, pits, death and blood!)

It worked out well, I think. Some examples of what pupils have made so far include:

• A big dark foggy pit with a rope bridge
• An army of dragons/seagulls/chickens
• A forest fire
• Teams of dragons that fight

And they came up with doing stuff like this next week:

• Get the creatures to talk to us
• Go inside houses
• Be able to attack people and not just get killed by dragons
• How to make dragons your pet
• How to have a family in your game
• Changing the colours of the characters
• Picking stuff up

These are, I’d say, all important in creating good games. Pupils had a go at each other’s games and showed each other how to do stuff.

I’m very impressed with their work, two hours into the course! Well done S1! It’s great to see the class enjoying something like that and feeling free to take it in the direction they see fit to.
I’ll be giving a demonstration of some of the Neverwinter nights stuff at the Scottish Learning Festival in a few weeks, if anyone wants to see! Hopefully we’ll have videos of our games or maybe some demonstrators!