Designing video games, an occupation that seems perfectly aligned for California's 21st century economy, is among the new high school courses a state panel is proposing equally role of a revision of state standards that guide schools' efforts to gear up students for future careers.

A growing market: video games for sale.

A growing market: video games for auction. (Click to enlarge.)

The proposal is a new element in the updated version of California's "Career Technical Education Model Curriculum Standards" presented to the State Board of Education in Sacramento yesterday.  The public has until September 19 to offering comments before the concluding version is adopted by the Board.

Game pattern programs are offered at several California colleges  – only the proposal could provide an impetus for similar courses at the high schoolhouse level, said Patrick Ainsworth, assistant superintendent of career and college transition in the country Section of Education.

The curriculum standards are included in a massive typhoon document – 630 pages in all – outlining  career "pathways" in 15 sectors of the economy. Information technology revises standards adopted by the State Board for the starting time time in 2005 to take into account changes in the workplace since then. It is the end production of 18 months of piece of work based on input from over 300 business and industry representatives, also as educators.

The document responds to the increased pressures on loftier schools at a state and national level to make sure that students emerge from loftier schoolhouse "career and college set" – a concept that is open to multiple definitions.In extraordinary detail, it also matches the skills the students would learn in career technical courses with specific Common Core state standards in math and English language that California and most other states take adopted. California would be the first state to spell out the connections, according to Ainsworth.

A skeptical Board president Michael Kirst said he establish some of the proposed business concern pathways "unrealistic" and akin to "a junior MBA." He wondered how financially strapped high schools would be able to offering the very detailed and comprehensive programs outlined in the document. "It is not near the desirability, information technology is nearly the  feasibility," he said.

Ainsworth responded that the pathways are becoming a "core attribute of high school reform." "We recognize the financial realities out at that place, just we weren't willing to compromise in terms of rigor," he said. In fact, the centerpiece of legislation proposed past Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, at present pending Governor Chocolate-brown's signature (SB 1458), proposes incorporating how well a school prepares its students for college and career into the Academic Functioning Index, the country's principal measure of a school'south academic success.

Ainsworth later told EdSource Today that some 10,000 career technical courses are offered in California loftier schools. Several pathways in the model standards were  revised to take into account changes in other occupations since the get-go standards. The Department of Defense and Section of Homeland Security helped in the redesign of the "Public Safe" pathway. Mental health experts helped integrate the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder into the "Mental and Behavioral Health" pathway. And environmental issues receive greater prominence in the "Energy and Utilities" pathway, now retitled "Free energy, Environment and Utilities."

Demanding courses

But the "Game Design and Integration Pathway" is completely new, designed with input from industry leaders such equally videogame maker Zynga, and is meant to to "prepare students for careers within the game design industry and in related technical fields."

To get there, withal, students would accept to traverse a demanding fix of skills and assignments.

Nether the suggested pathway, students would learn about "current trends and the historical significance" of electronic and non-electronic games. They would motility on to programming concepts, studying the utilise of game art and multimedia, including music, sound, art, and blitheness, and end up with an understanding of "fundamentals of business and marketing," including concepts such as entrepreneurship, global marketing, and localization.

Mary Clarke-Miller has been instruction a course titled "Video Game Design" at Encinal High School in Alameda for the past five years as office of its MAD (Media Animation and Pattern) Studio University.

She tin arrange 25 students in her class. The demand oftentimes exceeds the available slots – until students "discover yous are not only playing video games every day." Students learn about the history of videogames, along with doing a skilful deal of writing and programming, using programs  like Scratch, Google SketchUp, and GameSalad.

Clarke-Miller, a ten-yr veteran in the field, worked for the famed animator Don Bluth in her native Ireland on a number of 21st Century Fox animation projects, which also involved some games. She besides teaches similar courses at Berkeley Urban center College, a customs college. But, she says, high school courses like hers are unusual – then unusual that in a country with an association for almost every instruction specialty nothing exists for game instructors like herself. "I experience very lonely," she said.

That could change if schools have their cue from the model career standards.  As Ainsworth explained, "We recognize that schools are facing a crisis, and that they may not exist able to offer all these courses." The standards, he said, are simply models for schools to adopt or arrange every bit they see fit. Only, he said, "it is amend to accept standards that show an ideal pathway."  Even offer 1 course, he said, out of the many suggested in any particular pathway would be better than none.

Hearings on the proposed CTE Model Curriculum Standards volition be held adjacent week in Los Angeles and Sacramento. Become to the California Department of Teaching website for more details.

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