I was the Game Developer at an elementary school career day

I recently had the opportunity to speak at an elementary school career day to groups of kindergarten through 5th grade students about my career in game development.
The kids were super fun, they all loved talking about which video games they liked to play and could have gone on all day if we had the time. I ended up giving the same presentation around 15 times to groups of 5 or 6 kids at a time.

Feel free to use or show this presentation to classes. I am providing it under the Creative Commons Attribution License, please let me know if you end up using it and if there is a good response to it I may work on an expanded version.

I have a few insights below from the questions I asked them and the most common questions they asked me.

Questions the kids asked me:
How long have you been making games?
What is your favorite game that you’ve made?
Is programming hard?
What is your most popular game?
Are your games on the app store?
What is the weirdest game you have made?


“What games do you like to play?”

(answers in order of most to least)

  1. Minecraft
  2. Call of Duty
  3. Grand Theft Auto
  4. Paper Mario: Color Splash

Mentioned once each:
Five Nights at Freddy’s, Crossy Road, Pac Man

 

“What do you play games on?”
(answers in order of most to least)

  1. Phone
  2. Xbox
  3. PS4

What game developers do you know of?
(answers in order of most to least)

  1. Mojang (Minecraft)
  2. Microsoft

Mentioned once each:
Activision, Jeb (Minecraft), Scott Cawthon (Five Nights at Freddy’s), Gamestop, “My dad”, “I made a game”, “You”, and “Alex”

One of my favorite career day take-aways was seeing a kid’s face light up when he saw Kick Bot in my Two Scoop Games demo reel video. He shouted, “You made kick bot, I’ve seen that! I saw a YouTuber play that game! You made that?!”

 

And now to close out I have some great resources for learning to make games!

Games From Scratch

Girls Make Games

Louisville Makes Games!