1. “The road towards friendly,
classroom-centered interactive
digital contents authoring”
Andrea Valente
Emanuela Marchetti
University of Southern Denmark (SDU)
Odense Denmark

2. How to support authoring
of digital games (in class) ?
• In the past 10 years we worked on the problem of teachers
and pupils who want to author their own digital games (1)
• Situation:
tinkering is common,
creating analog games is too,
but…
changing a digital
game requires a
programmer
(1) “Learning via Game Design From Digital to Card Games and Back Again”
Marchetti, Emanuela; Valente, Andrea; Electronic Journal of E-Learning , 2015

3. Digital authoring
without a programmer
(or programming?)
… but how?
• Can we empower teachers and pupils to create digital interactive contents?
• Can we decouple digital creativity from programming?
• Do we need a full programming language for digital creativity? (Turing-complete?)
We explored alternative metaphors for programmming:
a card-game metaphor (diagram above)
and looked at a minimalistic approach, similar to game design and editing

4. Game design in the (Danish) classroom
• Existing pedagogical practice of editing/designing games, currently common in
Danish primary schools. Typical workflow:
– teachers introduce a topic in a lecture
– pupils engage with books and digital resources (gathered by teachers), such as: articles
or videos available on-line, or games
– then pupils play the given games and/or to produce creative artefacts to exemplify their
understanding: via board/card games, videos, or digital slides
• Danish schools are also starting to teach programming (CT) ->
they are open to exploring different digital tools, not just existing digital games or editors
• Many studies and evidence show usefulness of existing digital contents and self-
created analog games…
BUT… we observed a lack of tools for authoring interactive digital contents,
specifically targeted at teachers and pupils!

5. Requirements for Stick&Click
Need for new kind of visual, digital game authoring tool, with:
• no code -> just simple before/after rules
• limited interaction -> only point&Click game development
– with multiple rooms (here called pages)
• allows kids/teachers authoring of simple digital games, with custom images
and audio
• visual and possibly for web and/or android
• focus on the software engineering/design-cycle parts of CT
• as simple as possible computational model (i.e. hopefully easy to understand)
– based on a variation on hyperlinks!
– also: no math, no coordinates (?)

6. Inspiration…
Stickers and albums Game prototyping with paper
empty
Stickers Backgrounds Page (in an album)
Before ->
After
Before ->
After
…
Rules
places

7. Start here
click
Example of game with a single page:
Click the key and the boy gets it.
Then click the on the door and it will open.
Click on the open door and you will win.
Other features:
• multi-page
• persistency

8. Definition of the example
Notice that rule 1 and 4 are one the opposite of the other, as in the previous page :)

9. We made a node.js transpiler for our language, and gave it a Blockly GUI
Below is the same game with the visual GUI.
But… too code-like and not “visual”, non “tangible” -> can scare!

10. Current prototype workflow
So we created a new version in P5,
that has an editor and a player,
both working as WebApps.
The workflow is as shown:
We are currently testing it.
(DEMO)
You can see a preview here:
Editor:
https://editor.p5js.org/andrea270872/present/s9xijiDlG
Player:
https://editor.p5js.org/andrea270872/present/chgF2ZeNP
rules
cards
Export to paper…

11. Scenarios of use
teacher
Stick&Click
create
game
play/
understand
child
child
child
teacher
Stick&Click
explain
child
child
child
playtest and
(re)design &
the game
1.
2.
child
child

12. Conclusion
and ongoing work
• So why? “friendly, classroom-centered interactive digital contents authoring”
– pupils and teachers can create own digital contents
– designed to be friendly towards non-programmers
– the workflow matches and supports existing analog/paper-based activities in the
classroom,
– the resulting digital contents are not just a PDF, but instead are interactive, game-like.
• Open questions: how-to score or lives, orchestration of game development in classroom
• Tests with teachers of a local school in Denmark (late 2019/spring 2020)
– deploy Stick&Click and observe it within the classroom ecology,
– goals: make P5 protoype user-friendly,
capable of covering authoring of interesting digital games,
and simplify/perfect the stickers+album metaphor
• Finally: make a working mobile version (python+Kivy) -> touch!

13. Conclusion
and ongoing work
• So why? “friendly, classroom-centered interactive digital contents authoring”
– pupils and teachers can create own digital contents
– designed to be friendly towards non-programmers
– the workflow matches and supports existing analog/paper-based activities in the
classroom,
– the resulting digital contents are not just a PDF, but instead are interactive, game-like.
• Open questions: how-to score or lives, orchestration of game development in classroom
• Tests with teachers of a local school in Denmark (late 2019/spring 2020)
– deploy Stick&Click and observe it within the classroom ecology,
– goals: make P5 protoype user-friendly,
capable of covering authoring of interesting digital games,
and simplify/perfect the stickers+album metaphor
• Finally: make a working mobile version (python+Kivy) -> touch!