Game Maker: A Summer Time Project 1

In September I have decided to run game making workshops as after school enrichment sessions for Phase 3 and 4 students.  My absolute first choice for this would have been Kodu (site currently offline),as inschool sessions could have been extended if students chose to develop their games for use on xboxes (check out part one of this video tutorial by Stuart Ridout for a flavour).  After some pondering background checks and discussion with our network manager we realised that in order to run the platform we would also need to upgrade our DirectX and .Net Framework installations before deployment, so Kodu sadly was placed on hold, at least for the time being anyway.

Having played around ocassionally withYoYo Games's Gamemaker Lite and built one or two simple multi level platform games quite painlessly, this is now the tool of choice for the two term project based sessions. The lite version is a free download, and allows games made to be exported as .exe files.  My target over the next few weeks is to improve my familiarity with the tool and generate some support materials that will help students use the tool to clone some familiar games.  I have identified one or two great places to start

• Firstly the tutorials on Margaret Meijers fabulous website ICT Mindtools, This space is well worth a visit, if you haven't already I would highly recommend you do.
• Secondly I have bought a copy of David Waller's Basic Projects:Gamemaker
• And of course the introductory tutorial included with the software itself.

Hoping to share my progress with you here as I go.