GameUp is one of the largest educational game platforms available, with games by 43 partner organizations and BrainPOP itself. In the process of curating games for BrainPOP’s 800+ educational topics, we have explored different approaches to making our internally-developed games over the past 7 years. BrainPOP went from developing 3 content-oriented games to developing 3 skill-oriented games. We’ll talk about why we transitioned, what worked, and what didn’t work throughout the process.

1. Kevin Miklasz Scott Price

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9. BrainPOP’s (Content) Games

10. Learning Goal:

11. Learning Goal:

13. We made games!
They were good.
Mechanics were linked to learning goals, exploratory.
Guts and Bolts and Food Fight are still in our top ten most
popular games
We ‘own’ Food Fight

14. A lot of design effort for small content coverage
A lot of teaching effort needed for good classroom use
High ramp up time for teachers between games
And no one was paying for games
Learning goal was as much about a skill as about content

16. Learning Goal:

19. Broader content coverage (~200 topics per game)
Quick process to generate new content
Enabled repeated skill practice in different contexts
Low teacher ramp-up time
Enabled analog student game creation
Data reports were not compelling
Data reports did not generalize well across all three games
These aren’t games to games people (especially Sortify)

20. More superficial connection to content

22. Educational “Content agnostic” Skill Game
Application of skills across content areas
Mechanics
Game specific assets/components
Civilization

25. Designing for the school environment
As a Game Designer:

26. ● Are you starting with skill or content?
● What does the other side offer?
● Schools and teachers think in terms of content As an
educator:
● What content does this game’s skill cover?
● Do the game’s skills support the content?