3 March 2018

“How does a kid know they if they want to be a pianist or not if they’ve never seen a piano?”

A primary school teacher said this to me a few years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. It’s a phrase that has stuck with me as we first planned and are now implementing the STEAM the Museum project. Except instead of piano’s, we are thinking about STEAM. Because how does a kid know if they want to be a robotics engineer or not if they have never seen a robot? Or a video game designer if they’ve never had a chance to code a video game?

And so following this thinking, today we hosted a workshop with the trainers from Codespace Education. Codespace is a group that runs coding camps and after-school workshops for kids who would like to learn how to make video games. So, instead of kids playing of video games, they get to place themselves front and centre and start to make the video games. It's not just about video games though - it's about understanding how these games are made, and becoming creators, not just consumers.

After a few warm-ups, the kids worked on creating backgrounds, platforms, scenery, coins and avatars for their games. They also had to code in the actions and controls for each game. It was amazing to see how different they all were, and how amazing they all looked at the end!

Designing the backgrounds is just the beginning.

It was a great opportunity to bring this type of workshop to Wagga Wagga, and to provide so many kids with the opportunity to experiment with coding and game design. It allowed the Museum to carry out our 'core business' – curating an exhibition – while also providing an opportunity to our community to participate in something that they normally would have to travel to a capital city for. The STEAM the Museum group worked on games that matched some of their historical periods, but we were also able to offer twenty kids from the community an opportunity to come along for the day and learn coding basics.

In the STEAM the Museum exhibition, the gaming group is tasked with designing a time travel video game that explores the environment of the Riverina across different times in the past, and also imagine what it might look like in the future.

We can’t wait to see what these future game designers will create.

Jack, Teddy and Moryam working on their games with Lachlan from CodeSpace.

Niam and Stephanie testing their games.