Lessons From Creation

Two weeks of create in the bag and we have all learned a lot.  Let me begin by saying that this is a blast!  My favorite part so far has been just watching the kids discover things.  Whether it is the Racers making tracks that reach tallest point that they can then plummet to the lowest point allowed in the creation space or watching another young creator place bounce pads at different heights (on pause) just to bounce around and declare it is the most fun he has had with a game.  It has been a joy to watch them play with gravity, paint, track coating, fire, and glass.  I watched my Runners make the same object about fifty times and laugh hysterically when they unpaused it and the objects all fell to the ground. No joke, by the end of their first session, one of the kids had made his name out of materials and triumphantly shouted, “Look!” as he tweaked it to be covered in flames.  This has been a lot of fun.

This is a sample of what one of the students is working on in Karting.

At the same time we have all had to tapper our expectations a bit.  After creating three educational levels (working on my fourth, more on that soon), two regular levels in LBP 1, one unpublished monstrosity, and three or four races in ModNation Racer (from the same people who developed LBPKarting), I had to remember that is was not easy at first, and that is where all my learners are.  Rather than letting them do everything, I am going to have to take a co-creator role.  On an individual basis I am going to have to use the same practice I do when teaching. Model, guide, let go.  There are things that they want to do that I am going to need to walk them through and ideas that we are going to have modify based on what is available in the game and the amount of time we have.  I am still completely confident that they will each make something really cool by the end of the year, but they will need a guiding hand.

Sorry about the dark picture, it was a cloudy day outside.

The kids have also had a bit of a realization.  For the kart racing team, they have played with the track editor and enjoyed themselves.  Now is the tricky part; taking the nice tracks that they have built and turning them into actual races or getting down to business with their ideas for arenas.  For the LBP2 kids it is the realization that this may not be as easy as it all seems.  This is going to take a while.  Fortunately, we have a while.  3 months to be exact.  It will come together, or at the very least we will have something that resembles their ideas to share.