Project Info
My Role: Creative Director of Curriculum
TechSmart is a company that develops complete coding curricula for grades K-12. For over eight years, I served as their Creative Director of Curriculum, helping the company grow from a tiny garage startup to a leading provider used by tens of thousands of students across the nation.
While not in the game development industry (but rather my day job while developing indie games), TechSmart gave me a chance to hone many relevant skills. I led a team of creatives and developers, maintained a cohesive creative vision, and strategized how best to meet the various constraints of each course. Plus, I helped design over five hundred games and activities as part of TechSmart’s courses, all towards the goal of making learning engaging (and ultimately help students develop portfolios and improve career outcomes).
Scope of Work
- Lead role in designing 12+ rigorous coding courses used by tens of thousands of students nationwide, from introductory visual coding to an intensive four-semester high school sequence
- Developed creative strategies to maximize the engagement of each course, then coordinated a team of artists and developers to execute on them
- Designed over 500 games and activities for students to code, with the goal of engaging, entertaining, and inspiring
- Hands-on experience designing instructional lectures, exercises, and assessments using best practices in engagement and pedagogy (and even occasionally filling in as a teacher)
- Wrote promotional copy, including website
Narrative Design Highlights
Instructional Design
At TechSmart, I kept up-to-date on best practices in pedagogy and instructional design, and employed them to shape each lesson and activity. This experience has a number of applications within games:
- Creating and iterating on tutorials
- Assessing and improving player understanding of narrative elements
- Building mysteries and other plot revelations (i.e. guiding players to learn about the narrative along a desired trajectory)
- Writing UI and instructional text
Course Narratives
I spearheaded an initiative to improve student engagement by adding overarching narrative elements to our courses for grades K-6. Student activities and coding projects take place with a consistent world and characters, designed to appeal to a grade school audience while including themes of social and emotional development relevant to that age group.
The primary course sequence takes place in the world of Aetherial, where fantastic element-themed characters live in four realms. The story follows four children who meet unexpectedly and travel the world together. The four realms are very insular, but these heroes show them how they can share their unique powers to solve problems and improve their lives. For example, in one activity, the inventive Breeze uses her wind powers to make a new musical instrument for the arts-loving Water Realm, and in another Flame teaches the Air Realm how to play an aerial version of his favorite sport. Ultimately, they help found a new town where people from all four kingdoms can live in harmony.
TechSmart later introduced a series of cross-curricular activities to teach math, science, and social studies objectives. Since it would be confusing to learn about history or physics in a fantasy world, we developed a new narrative for these activities. They follow Curious Labs, a team of fantasy creatures who are excited to explore our world. Ada the Dragon wants to learn about natural sciences, Isaac the Unicorn loves math and engineering, Yukichi the Kitsune explores different cultures, and Seshat the Sphinx loves literature and drama. In each activity, students join one of them to discover something about our world (and meet a Common Core learning objective).
I decided against continuing an overarching narrative for our high school courses, since many students in that age group reported skepticism about stories in the classroom as “for kids.” To engage those students, we’d have to answer “why am I learning this?” and allow them to discover and foster their own motivations. To accomplish this, every lesson was centered around different real-world applications of coding. For example, a lesson about automation had activities exploring its use in music, the automotive industry, and environmentalism. Rather than a conventional narrative, the course’s creative strategy is to survey enough interests to inspire every student, and allow them to develop a personalized portfolio through project-based learning.