Homeschool Unit Study Video Game Edition 🎮

Last year at Jake’s suggestion we began our school year learning about Pirates. This year the kids suggested video games as our first topic of the year and we went for it. Let it be known that before this unit I did not like video games…at all. My husband does though and a couple of years ago I agreed to let him buy the kids a Nintendo Switch for Christmas. We play as a family and it’s actually quite fun and engaging for all of us. Before this unit study I knew very little about video games, but was surprised how fascinated I became as we learned more about their history, how they are made, how many different types of careers are in the video game industry (from artists, writers and coding) and how cool Nintendo’s story is. I’m a bit of a Shigeru Miyamoto fan now. He is kind of the Walt Disney of video games.

History of Video Games

We started by learning about the history of video games

We watched some Youtube videos and read some books…”Blips on a Screen”, by Kate Hannibal, “The Boy who Thought Outside the Box (Ralph Baer)”, Marcie Wessels, “Amazing Inventions Video Games a Graphic History” by Sean Tulien and “What is Nintendo”, by Gina Shaw were some of our favorites.

We also checked out some of my husbands old video game consoles (super nintendo, Wii and playstation) and played Simon.

How Video Games are Made

Next we moved on to how video games are made.

We watched some videos and read a lot of books.

Field Trip

This solid background information about video game history and how they are made set us up for a trip to the American Classic Arcade Museum in New Hampshire. They have classic arcade games from way back in the day. We are talking PONG, Space Invaders and the ORIGNIAL Donkey Kong (the game where Mario, Jumpman at the time, made his debut).

Japan

We spent some time learning about Japan, the birthplace of Nintendo and Mario! We watched videos and read books (notice a theme here 😂). We learned about Origami and tried to make some of our own. Our friends let us borrow some cool things they had from Japan. Japanese money was our favorite.

Design Your Own Video Game

We also spent some time designing our own video games. The kids created characters, wrote storylines and drew scenes. I have free downloads for the templates I created for this linked below.

Create your Own Video Game Characters

Create your Own Video Game Scenes Storyboard

Create Your Own Video Game Story

Poem for Peach

We listened to “Peaches” from the new Mario movie, the love song Bowser sings and then I had the kids each write their own acrostic poem for Princess Peach.

Coding

We learned a bit about coding by reading a lot of books (“How to Code a Sandcastle”, Josh Funk and “Code Monkeys Use Logic”, John Wood were both great simple ways to explain coding vocabulary). We used code.org and scratch to try out some super simple kid friendly coding. The kids favorite was Minecraft Hour of Code Tutorials.

Random Fun

Video Game Mad Libs

Music

We of course often listened to video game music throughout our day. These playlists on Spotify were a couple of our favorites.

The kids did these fun Youtube videos that got them moving.

Played Video Games

Of course there was some video game playing. Anika designed a log that the kids kept of the games the played, when they played, what levels they completed and the character they played.