Video Game Design/Developers

What types of stuff do you do in collaboration with other departments at your school?

For example, when I used to also teach Social Science, I had the game dev kids make World War I, the TTRPG.

This semester, for my Intellectual Property Unit, students are choosing from a menu of books that include the entire ELA9 and ELA10 book list.

In my board game class, the first semester is final is making a game based on the book they are reading in English class. Students are grouped by grade/teacher as much as possible. This project gets okay results.

The second semester final is making a game based on a historical event. The emphasis is to research something new and not repeat something they have already learned, so I veto a lot of ideas during the brainstorm process. Another facet of this project is that since the game is meant to teach the player about an event, it does not have to be fair (it just has to feel fair). Recent good projects have been about the Fall of Constantinople, The Punic Wars, US/Soviet space race, The African Rinderpest Pandemic, and the Meso-American Ball Game.

Cross-curricular projects in the digital classes I haven't attempted yet since making a digital game is hard enough already without the added constraint of the needs of a "client". When my digital students work on their own projects in the spring I will probably require a "setting" for their games that informs some design decisions and see how that works as a first attempt before going cross-curricular.

I haven't done much cross-curricular work in my game dev classes yet, but they're still new. I have talked with our animation teacher to see if he'd be interested in doing some partnership with his classes making spritesheets or something like that. Hasn't panned out yet, but it's still looking decently likely for later in the year.

My AP CS Principles class' project right now is very cross-curricular though. We're a fully project-based school, so they have some large-scope project they're working on in every class. My CSP students chose a project they're working on for another class and they're making a companion web app for the culmination of that project in some way. Lots of virtual art galleries and business plan webpages. So far so good there.