Game Design Tools

Creating games stimulate children's creativity and critical thinking skills. Here are tools that will help students or anyone interested in creating games learn how to design a game:

1. Gamestar Mechanic -  a game based quest to teach kids the principles of game design. Every time someone play a game or completed a quest he/she get access to avatar, backgrounds, and other things that were used in the games that he/she played. These rewards can be used in designing his/her own game.

Sprite Shlep

Clean Slate

2. Scratch - It is a free educational programming language that allows anyone, children or adult to create visualization, stories and games using Sprites. 

3.  Kodu - It needs to be downloaded but it lets anyone, children or adult with no design or programming skills create games on PC and XBox through a simple visual programming language. It can be used to teach creativity, problem solving, storytelling, etc.

4. GameSalad - It is an authoring tool lets anyone even with with no coding knowledge create games then publish them iPhone, iPad, Android and HTML5.

5. AgentSheets - It needs to be downloaded and only offer free trial but it lets anyone create their own agent based games and simulations through a user friendly drag-and-drop interface