On Saturday May 9th over 35 students from 20 schools came to the first Mouse/Hive Chicago Game Jam to hack, create and play with games at Intrinsic Schools. This event was a part of the Scratch Day celebration that took place around the world.

We started the day by watching presentations from some professional game designers who came to hang out with us. We had designers from Gameseed, We Are Chicago, Octodad and more! After the presentation, we could go to seven different activity stations to learn how games are made and try our hand at making our own!

• Mouse lead an activity from our Serious Games badge where we remixed a game using Scratch. You can check out all the remixes on the Mouse studio on Scratch.
• Important Little Games taught us how to create our own sports.
• Iridescent helped us create choose-your-own-adventure games to escape a Sharknado in Twine.
• CodeCreate showed us how to build robot cars that we could race!
• Plug-In Studio taught us how to modify levels in Unity.
• Blue 1647 used Scratch to remix Flappy Bird.
• Game Changer Chicago took a hexagonal grid of Chicago and let us create our own board games with it!

At the end of the day we gathered around the microphone to share some of the projects that we made. Some showed their racing cars, some talked about their board games or the remixes they made in Scratch or the Sharknado story they wrote. After the share-out we raffled off Nintendo DS systems to some lucky winners!

Thanks so much to everyone who made this day a success!

Be sure to check out Hive Chicago for more events and check out our Serious Games badge here on mousesquad.org.