Towards Creative Pedagogy: empowering Students to Develop Games

Due to social, economic, and technological changes in our society creativity is nowadays seen as basic survival and success factor. Thus, innovation, creativity and production of media should be emphasized also in the school of the future. However, current schooling system tends to produce consumers of media instead of creative problem solvers, critical thinkers, and producers of media. At this point also educators and policy makers should be creative and introduce innovative learning solutions and practices that support the development of creativity and 21 century skills. This paper replies to this call by considering learning by developing games as one of future learning strategies. Learning by developing games is not totally new idea, but the research has only begun to explore the possibilities that this pedagogical strategy provides. In this article we introduce a new game authoring environment MAGOS that is developed according to the framework of creative pedagogy. The framework of creative pedagogy comprises of three interrelated elements of creative teaching, teaching for creativity, and creative learning. From these three elements we derived eight design principles that guided the development of MAGOS environment. MAGOS supports creative teaching practices by providing different tools for planning and for teacher participation. Teaching for creativity is supported by offering an imaginative and innovative learning environment and tools with which a teacher can support students' creative and constructive processes. MAGOS include multiple elements that promote students' collaborative game development that is supposed to enhance co-creation of knowledge. MAGOS requires a joint effort for game development and enables building on each others' ideas through sharing and remixing other students' existing work. MAGOS also provides a tool that helps students to generate novel ideas for their joint game development.