Why is an emphasis on design, rather than programming, important?
This distinction is quite important for several reasons. First, many excellent game-making software products exist already and have been used, in limited cases, by teachers in K-12 and university contexts. These tools include Game Maker, RPG Maker, Stagecast Creator, 3D Game Maker, Zillions of Games, Toontalk, Klik and Play, and Adventure Game Studio to name but a few, with many more products currently in development. These tools have a proven track record of facilitating game production and have opened up the context of game making to those who are not professional game designers. Yet while each of these tools enables game design, they don’t explicitly embed the practice or thinking of game design within the experience and often focuses on game programming as the primary pedagogy. Within these tools games emerge out of a set of programming procedures: make the ball bounce against a wall: Make a wall sprite and a ball sprite; manipulate the ball: Add Event > Event Selector > Mouse > Le
