Education in Gaming

In this section of the site, we want to examine the nature of gaming in education. How are schools using gaming to motivate our children and also providing a strong foundation for improving learning? We hope to present you a series of articles showing the techniques and ideas that are used around the world with a gaming focus.

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Little Big Planet

Jon Evans

There is already an initiative by Sony to use Little Big Planet in Schools. I managed to get hold of a copy of move pack from Sony with Little Big Planet bundled in. There are certain restrictions with using Playstations in schools, from mistrust of gaming in general, to the prohibitive cost of buying one console per child, but I intend to chip away at these problems and report on here how it goes. 

Here is a game level I made in Little Big Planet. As a teacher, I'm expected to present to the parents, every so often, information on the children's ICT curriculum. I was so bored with Microsoft Powerpoint I decided to present using a level of Little Big Planet. I built this in the original game, but have since ported it to LBP2. In retrospect I created a lot of work for myself here, it took me 3 months to build (and it is still embarrassingly primitive), but it impressed the parents. I wish I had my Elgato at the time too, I actually played this live as I presented it and it was surprisingly difficult to present and play at the same time. You can see why games devs get other people to do it at shows. 

Nevertheless it made a big impact and taught me much about the game and also game level design. Something which I passed onto the children when they used Scratch (more on that later). It is a very powerful tool and, if you're keen to play it, you can find it in the Little Big Planet community section. Just search for 'SVPS'.