Turning Teens into Teachers with GDevelop - Part 2

This is the 2nd part of a series of 3 articles about teens teaching GDevelop to other kids. You can read part 1 here and part 3 here.

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Getting the chance to teach others what you know, with your own materials, is a very special experience. Being able to be a part of others' success experiences along their learning is truly an honor and an awesome feeling. Being given the opportunity to see them evolve throughout the workshop makes you proud! Also for the teens to get even more knowledge that they already got. This was what I was hoping to pass forward to these two teens, during their experience. Read about prepping for the workshop here.

The 1st day of the workshop (2hrs)

They had a bit of technical issues at the beginning, but the teens had an awesome experience nonetheless! After that, they got the program installed on the participants' computers and created a new game. As they were teaching younger kids themselves, they wanted only to save the game locally on their computer for now. GDevelop lets you make a free account by default and store your game in the cloud.

By choosing the dropdown menu “Where to store this project”, which is a pretty nice feature added though they needed then to make an account if so, the teens chose “Your computer” and selected a folder instead, as they were teaching young kids.

After this “They all got to set up W, A, S, D for controls and some even got their player to shoot. I did however get to experience that there is a lot of doing nothing, like waiting between questions and having patience acquired with teaching. If you’re not prepared for this and don't have the patience, it can be an issue”, Oliver Strandbygaard - one of the teens running the workshop.

In general the first day was a bit of a rush, succeeding in getting started and looking forward to next week!

The 2nd day of the workshop

The second week was very different for the two teens. This week there was a lot of work to do, so they took it bit by bit and divided the kids, since they didn’t have the opportunity to show it on a big screen for them all to follow. One kid was totally new to GDevelop and needed more time and explanation on how-to, where the two others had tried GDevelop before, so they knew how to navigate the program in advance.

Sometimes they showed the kids the programming, explaining how it works, if they had too much trouble making it. Other times they were guiding the kids on how to get there instead.

The 3rd day of the workshop (2hrs)

This day only one participant could make it, therefore the teens were able to focus only on him. He ended up finishing the game that day.

The 4th day of the workshop (2hr) - last day

The last day of the workshop weeks the participant newest to GDevelop got to try to develop his game further. The two other participants had stumbled into some challenges trying to make the game work with a lives counter while adding the feature to it, even though it seemed to be the same as the teens program, somewhere they were missing something. Nevertheless, it was a good experience for them.

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Follow the last part of the series of articles, where we will conclude on the process, where we will give feedback from the process: overall experience, challenges and solutions found along the way and what improvements we want to make for next time.

Stay tuned!