What I Learned Starting a Video Game Company with 10 Year Olds

Sometimes when there’s two weeks until state testing and you’re in the weeds of reviewing an entire year’s worth of curriculum, fretting about how to take a topic you spent an entire week teaching and encapsulate it in a 10 minute review window because you have a million other things to cover, something just snaps.

My class had been increasingly unruly. They were sullen, faking excuses to go to the nurse (“but my toe REALLY hurts!”), and generally unhappy. By the end of the day they would trudge out of the classroom, barely acknowledging the high five I offer on their way out the door. Earlier in the school year they were always excited to try to break every bone in my hand with a high five. Now some of them didn’t even give me so much as a look.

Good teachers use high fives not because they enjoy turning their palm into a petri dish to collect the unique germs of 23 students, but as a barometer of the classroom. If kids can’t even be excited to flee school at the end of the day, they must be in the deepest doldrums.

Like a soggy toddler’s diaper, I knew it was time for a change.

At the start of class the next day, as my 4th graders sat in their desks and the boys proceeded to pick apart their erasers on the atomic level and leave them all over the floor and the girls doodled or looked out the window to the green trees on the horizon, I snapped.

“You know guys, I’m going to start a company today…” I began. Maybe 3 sets of eyeballs were on me. “And I’m looking at some explosive growth. I’m hiring.”

Boom. Instantly 23 sets of eyeballs stared at me, and a little voice in the back of my mind cautioned “I hope you know what you’re doing…”

Welcome to Raney Day Games

Five Minutes Later a Logo and Company are Born!

All year I had encouraged my class to get into coding. I myself am a professional dilettante, so I’ve learned how to program roughly 17 times in my life. I’m great at beginning coding, making terrible websites and games that ask you to pick a number. I pushed my class to join me in the process. Throughout the year I had a core of nerdy kids who took to coding in the Scratch programming language. Scratch is a fantastic and totally free coding language. Users write code by assembling blocks together that control events on the screen. Think of it like Legos, but each Lego you snap together makes some magic occur on your computer. You can make just about anything in Scratch, but most people use it to make simple computer games that can be played in your web browser.

My plan was simple: have the students form groups, make a video game, and then publish said video game.

There were some interesting hurdles, like the fact that roughly a third of my class absolutely hated coding. I believe that we are rapidly approaching a future where knowing at least one programming language will be the equivalent of a person being literate in 1000 AD; not a requirement for survival, but a handy skill to have if you want to do anything other than absolute menial labor. I know how important it is for my class to become proficient with technology, but I can’t force them to like it.

So instead I tricked them.

“Raney Day Games is the name of the company. I spent a lot of time working on this logo,” I said, flashing a logo on the screen I’d made 5 minutes before they walked in the door. “We are hiring dynamic employees who can use their imagination to create amazing games.”

I handed out applications with five job titles and brief descriptions:

Executive Producer — Works with a small team of 4–5. Uses leadership to set goals, assign tasks, and make deadlines. People who apply for this role need to be organized, have good people skills, and be able to lead.

Coders — Coders need to be able to not only code, but also work well within a team. Coders must be able to take complex ideas and turn them into complex code. People who apply for this role need to be logical, good at math, and able to compromise.

Graphic Designers — Games are only as good as their art assets. Graphic designers take vague ideas and them into reality… well, virtual reality at least. Graphic designers need to be talented at design and drawing, able to take criticism, and work with a team.

Story Producers — Anyone can create a simple video game, but only a story producer can turn the game into an epic battle between good and evil. Story producers are in charge of creating the lore of the game, the story the game follows, and the dialogue for the characters. Story producers must have excellent writing skills and be immensely creative.

Marketing Executives — The greatest game of all time would never see the light of day without the help of a marketing executive. Marketing executives work to create hype for the game being developed by making websites, posters, and advertisements. Marketing executives also gather survey data to determine what people want in a successful video game. Marketing executives must be good with people, creative, and able to get people excited.

The learning standards tell me that students need to know things like what a denominator is or how to analyze a character trait in a story, but they don’t really tell us the things kids are going to need to be successful when they enter the working world. I’ve given this some thought, and here’s what I think this generation coming up is going to need to be:

1. Technically literate. They may not be writing the code, but they will be working with people who are. They need to have a grasp of programming so they understand the limitations and possibilities of what can be produced. They’ll also be using computers to do every facet of their job, so they better be able to understand what they are capable of. For me, it was critical that the part of my class that did not like coding at least understand and respect its power.
2. Have excellent soft skills. The term soft skills is thrown around a lot and I think it’s sometimes confused with “being nice” or “not being a total jerk”. I like to think of a company as having a giant spaghetti knot series of problems, and they hire teams of people to undo those knots. They need teams of people who don’t get overwhelmed, can see the big picture and help others on their team stay calm. We want to work with people who can make the process of undoing those knots fun, or at the very least, bearable.
3. Able to take literally nothing and turn it into something. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said that any new technology is indistinguishable from magic. We inhabit a world where technology is moving at light speed. The Wright Brothers made the first successful flight in 1903, by 1914 planes had machine guns strapped to them, by 1969 a person had walked on the moon, and a week ago I got on a plane in sweat pants and flip flops. But the progress of flight moved glacially by modern standards. Remember MySpace? Founded in 2003, the largest social media company in the world by 2007, and a punchline by 2010. Future employees are going to be racing to take a vague idea and turn it into reality before it becomes almost immediately obsolete.

All in All You’re Just Another Code Block in the Wall

We didn’t actually do anything for the project on days one or two. I needed to look at their applications, put them into jobs, and then form their groups which I called “development teams” because that sounds vaguely like something a real video game studio would do.

The class was excited. They were electric. I hung the prospect of Raney Day Games in front of them like a dirt farmer puts a carrot in front of a stubborn mule.

“Pull the plow well during today’s excruciating review of fractions, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll let you know your job assignments.” My high five barometer by the end of days one and two was about off the charts. I had to ice my hand down from the enthusiasm.

I formed the groups and had to make some tough decisions that all classroom autocrats like myself do: do I put them with their friends, or mix them up? Do I make a group of all girls, or mix up genders. Do I cloister the TAG students together, or do I put them out into the general population.

Jobs and groups were assigned, laptops and coding books were distributed, and areas of the classroom were claimed for workspaces. The big state test loomed on the horizon. In a couple days a storm cloud would unleash torrents of bubble sheets, multiple choice questions, and test anxiety. But a ray of hope broke forth from the heavens and descended into room A203. Kids were heard talking excitedly. Deep discussions were had about how to solve problems. There may have even been laughter as I tried to play one of their games and the character walked off the screen never to be seen again.

We worked on the Raney Day Games project for two and a half weeks. We got through the STAAR test days (spoiler alert: we survived and no one’s arms and legs fell off) and got down to the real work of creating our games. I, as CEO and benevolent dictator, guided them as they worked.

I know I titled this article What I Learned Starting a Video Game Company with 10 Year Olds, which is a supremely click-baity title and I apologize for that. I will deliver on that promise and reveal what I learned from this project.

1. Kids are good at arguing. A project like this will definitely show you who will grow up to become a lawyer. I had one student go on strike because they wanted to make an entirely different game than literally everyone else in their group.
   The group approached me looking to me to fix the issue. I spoke to the striking student and said “I’m sorry the group doesn’t want to go in the direction you want, but you can either join them in the project or resign. You can’t make a game by yourself. It’s just not possible, and I can’t reform groups this late in the project. Unfortunately, this is how the real world works.”
   I’d like to tell you that student put them self together and everything was great, but I cannot. This student plodded through the rest of the project. I won’t claim success, but I think my student learned a valuable lesson about the real world. We don’t always get our way and sometimes our dream is compromised. This is a consequence of working with others.
2. Don’t be afraid to try something outlandish, but then temper expectations. As work progressed, groups started coming to me with problems.
   Every group screeched at me “our game doesn’t work!” at some point during the project. My reply to all of these was “well you should fix that then.” Almost every problem came down to something being far too ambitious for the scope of our project. They wanted to create a game with 4 main characters, 99 levels, multiplayer, iOS support, and a story arc that encompassed all of human history.
   I appreciated their ambition, but almost every group had to be guided back to the basics. “Can you get a main character to move around the screen?” or “Maybe before working on the 5 minute cinematic intro to the game, you could work on drawing the main character?” I would ask. If you do a project like this, it’s important to give them milestones to hit. Otherwise they go off in crazy directions and lose valuable time.
3. You need way more time, but you won’t get it. None of my groups completed their games. Not a single one!
   Was this a failure?
   Yes and no. Obviously I wanted them to finish. I wanted the superintendent to waltz into my room, play each of their games, and hand me plaque that said “Teacher of the Century”. What happened instead was I had some half finished games that were the seeds of something great. But I also had kids who were genuinely excited about what they had made and had learned a lot about themselves and how the creative process works.

Next year I will dust off Raney Day Games a week earlier and try this again. I’ve learned a few things and grown as a CEO. I encourage all classroom teachers to start a company staffed with 10 year olds and venture out from the traditional curriculum and into the real world for a little while.