Joystick Designs

While there are many tools for making games, most of these have focused on designing screen interfaces leaving aside the potentially rich space of designing tangible game interfaces. This paper reports on a workshop with middle school youth who created game controllers with MaKey MaKey, a tangible construction kit, to interface with their remixed Scratch games. The analyses focus on the design of game interfaces and programs and indicate that youth mostly replicated common controller designs but varied in their attention to either functionality or aesthetics. The interface designs followed traditional gender lines with girls more focused on aesthetics and boys more focused on functionality and were, to some extent, replicated in the remixes of the Scratch games. In the discussion we address the pedagogical and technological opportunities and challenges of including the design of tangible interfaces in game making for learning.