Tallinn Summer School | Design of Serious Games

Non-Degree / Dates: 9-13 July 2018

The Digital Learning Games international master curriculum is providing a one-week course in designing serious games.

Serious games are games that are designed for a serious purpose and not only for entertainment. This serious purpose can be related with the defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, religion, politics or something similar. Digital Learning Games is multidisciplinary curriculum that combines game design, interaction design and instructional design. It’s objective is to bring together experts with different background (art, ICT, pedagogy, psychology) and design and develop learning games in heterogeneous teams.

During the short summer course participants will get the essence of designing serious and learning games. Students with different background from all over the world are forming teams and design new serious games from idea to working prototype. For prototyping the environment that does not require programming skills is used.

Course topics:

1. The nature of serious games
2. Examples of serious and learning games
3. Game design process and roles
4. Finding the idea and defining goal for the serious game
5. Gameplay: challenges and actions
6. Game core mechanics: objects and conditions
7. Design of game assets: game world, characters, story
8. Game Development environments
9. Game Development in eAdventure

The language of the course is English.

Why this course?

The course brings together people with different backgrounds who can learn a lot not only from the teacher, but also from each other.
You will find out how to make learning more fun for yourself and others.

Teacher(s)

Associate Professor Martin Sillaots is teaching Game Design, Computer Graphic and Research Methods in Tallinn University. He is a partner of serious games projects like: SELEAG, siLang, EcoHouse, Change Management and member of Network of Serious Games ‐ SEGAN. He is a co-founder of the Gamrilla game startup.

Timetable

Classes take place from Monday to Friday. Please see the full programme here.

Participants

The course is for teachers, educational technologists, designers, developers, story writers, graphical designers and all others who are interested in designing serious games. Our goal is to form heterogeneous teams of students with different backgrounds.