Design, Learn, Play: a games’ co-design workshop in Cyprus

Publication date: September 3, 2014

The Code RED project and EuroCy Innovations recently organized a successfully a workshop on digital (educational) games’ co-design. The objective of the games’ co-design workshop was to engage young people in an interactive (group) process of designing and implementing digital educational games’ prototypes.

The workshop ended on 4th July 2014 and it run in approximately 20 hours (ten 2-hour sessions). During this time, 8 young students from Limassol, Cyprus (6 girls and 2 boys), together with 1 trainer and 3 researchers-trainers had a great opportunity to walk through the process of games’ co-designing kindly suggested by Nottingham Trent University in the framework of the Code RED project.

During the workshop, participants had the opportunity to work as a team, exchange experiences, share roles and responsibilities in the team, see examples of digital (educational) games/products developed by others. This enabled them to establish expectations, learn how to deconstruct the rules of games, create and discuss their own game ideas using low-tech prototyping tools (e.g. LEGO models, a pack of playing cards, paper or other digital means of taking notes, coloured pens, etc.), even implement a low-tech prototype of their game idea(s), using selected game authoring software or simply a “storyboard template”.

You can get a view of the hard but enjoyable work done during the workshop in the photos gallery.

The team has not come to the end of the workshop with empty hands. We are proud to release the prototype game “The H-Angry Donkey”, developed using “Stencyl”! Please, try it and do not hesitate to send us your comments/suggestions/bug-reports at trainings@eurocyinnovations.com.

We are eager to share the experiences and best practices from these training procedures, hoping to inspire more teams to adopt co-design workshops in Cyprus and Europe in general.