Gunning for MissionMaker!

Spent the beginning part of Term 4 trying to complete our MisssionMaker games to put on our blogs. The kids took many hours tweaking their games, adding special effects and tricks, which in the end probably got in the way of the games they were making. 

I was really impressed with the way that they took on the challenge of making the games. They were not given much input into how to get things to happen in their games. Word of mouth and “experts” helped them along, trial and error and lateral thinking also enabled everyone to come up with a basic game. 

Of interest was the depth of focus of the students. All were totally focused on bringing their historical knowledge to the fore. They knew exactly what they wanted to do and there was very little use of guns within the games. I hadn’t given any instructions re guns and violence; I thought I would just see what evolved as they were making their games.  

I had discussed this issue with John Westwood from Lower Wyche C of E School in England, and he had noticed that his students had a bit of a play with the shooting aspects, but then moved on and concentrated on other areas of the game making. I found that this happened in my classroom as well.  Most of the class played with shooting things, but quickly moved onto making their historical game – we had explosions and fires but no death and destruction as such. 

The big exception to this happened when I received some “extras” into my class at the beginning of Term 4. These students hadn’t done any research into an historical period, and the MissionMaker game making was a bonus activity, rather than a purposeful way to demonstrate their learning of a topic. In these student’s games shooting was the be all and end all of the game. There was no other purpose to their games but to hunt and kill opponents. Interesting, but hardly surprising! 

Unfortunately the license for MissionMaker ran out at the end of the school year – not sure if this will affect our ability to post our games onto our blog for everyone to play or not.

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1 thought on “Gunning for MissionMaker!

  1. Hi Mrs.P!
    I miss going on MM
    (though I didn’t spend much time on it)
    I think that Mission Maker was a great and exciting way to make 3-D maze games but it is a bit confusing.
    Are the 08 Allstars doing Mission Maker?
    Anyways.. Bye
    Nancy

    Hello Nancy, I hope High School is treating you well 🙂
    MM was really fun and interesting, I liked working around problems till I sorted them out. (Although I’m not sure that my throwing the gun at the alien when I couldn’t work out how to fire the gun could be called “sorting it out”!) at least you guys were there to point me in the right direction (and tell me what to do) glad that I was the one who had the MM training 🙂

    Not sure what we will do with MM this year – but I have found a “sort of Samorost” game that looks promising – keep looking out over at the AllStars blog for further developments coming soon …….

    MrsP

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