Imagining Indigenous Worlds with Bitsy – STEAMPunks
- Location: Montreal, QC
- Date: August 1st and 4th 2023
- Duration: 2 sessions of 2hrs each
- Instructors: Vanessa Racine, Caeleigh Lightning, Bronson Jacques and Nancy Townsend
Overview:
The Skins Team was invited by STEAMPunks for a second year to give a workshop for their youth summer camp. STEAMpunks is an in-person day camp focusing on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) activities to nurture creative, technical and interpersonal skills all at once. It is an initiative from Concordia Universities for students aged 13-17 and takes place in the EV Building at the downtown campus. Campers participate in a range of hands-on workshops, laboratory visits, physical activities, and outings — designed and guided by university and college educators to inspire learning in a fun and engaging way.
For our workshop, we introduced students to Bitsy: a browser-based game development tool for mini worlds! In two days, a group of around 22 students each worked towards making their own 8-bit explorable world. It’s an intensive workshop, but the students caught on quickly, and began building their games even before our official tutorial began! We were excited to see such a big group able to collaborate and build so many unique, tiny worlds.
Every iteration of this workshop, participants bring in new, interesting narratives. It is always a problem solving puzzle to fit in everyone’s ideas due to the game engine’s constraints. Our participants are encouraged to think out of the box and come up with creative solutions. We had games exploring haunted houses, a strawberry market, and puzzles in distant galaxies.
Funded in part by:
