While teaching this, I was introduced to the local contemporary board game playing community and my D&D games became an after school program that included playing board games and CCGs. Design Craft was a course that I taught for summer school too, so I was able to test and refine my curriculum. I had a new class that I was teaching, called Design Craft, that I choose to include game design concepts in. Here I continued with D&D and a student club. That took me from the school where I taught the video game design course and brought me to a different school and new opportunities. In 2009 there were a large amount of teacher lay offs in California. At this time I was running D&D for my students and the students had a video game club. That research brought me to understanding the process of creating paper prototypes and how understanding the design that goes into a card or board game is essential to understanding the design process for a video game. It was mainly about making art for video games, but I did research on the design aspect of creating games. Today’s interview is with Matthew T Bivens, a Californian high school art teacher and hobby board game designer who is teaching iterative design process and design thinking to teenagers through the use of designing board games.Īs a high school art teacher, game design started out with a class titled video game design.
