This past weekend, DAM was invited to take part in the first ever White House Game Jam, featuring games created by teams from Disney, Sony, Ubisoft, Rovio along with several other gaming studios, educational games makers and academics like ourselves. It was an incredible experience that we are grateful for having taken part in. Also making the trip were the ETC’s Drew Davidson and the Culyba duo, Dave and Sabrina, whose game design advice was especially helpful with limited time to produce our game.
There was some debate about how much emphasis needs to be put into the educational side of educational games, but ultimately we decided to focus on making sure the game is fun as our top priority. If it is fun then the kids will want to continue to play it, increasing the likelihood of the educational aspects actually sinking in. We at DAM don’t think games being fun and educational are mutually exclusive at all and that theme was emphasized heavily throughout the weekend.
After bouncing around a few different game ideas we decided on pursuing a math angle with some help from one of the math educators on hand. We arrived on the idea of Piecewise functions, which are functions that are defined by multiple subfunctions, each subfunction applying to a certain interval of the main function’s domain. In less technical terms, Piecewise functions act differently on different pieces of the x axis, breaking up into different pieces, hence the term Piecewise.
It may seem complicated, but you can learn more just by watching the video we made for the presentation in the White House Complex here or from actually playing the game:
Playable Mac Build:
http://www.noteverythingisflammable.c…
Playable PC Build:
http://www.noteverythingisflammable.c…
We slept very little over the course of the weekend, culminating in a sleepless night before final submissions were due. This would not have been possible without Learning Objects for hosting us and the events sponsors for allowing us to fight off sleep with a constant supply of coffee and Monster energy drinks.
All in all, it was an incredible experience and a huge honor to take part in. We were blown away by the creativity from all of the teams and all of the great feedback and interest we received for The Piecewise Fort Incident.
Oh and we met Obama too:
