Improve your game dev teaching skills at the GDC Education Summit

Now that we're about a month out from this year's Game Developers Conference, organizers are eager to let you know about some of the great education-focused talks that will be taking place during the March conference.

Each of these talks is part of the GDC Education Summit, one of eight that will take place Monday, March 14th and Tuesday, March 15th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA during the first two days of the conference.

Each Summit offers a comprehensive overview of a specific game industry discipline, and this year the GDC Education Summit has a strong lineup that features talks like Eric Zimmerman's "How I Teach Game Design: Lessons for Working Game Designers."

Zimmerman has been teaching game design almost as long as he has been designing games. It is a focus of his teaching to create situations in which students can practice these skills, and in this session he'll share lessons learned and examples of classroom exercises  designed to hone particular game design skills and teach essential design concepts. 

Also, don't miss RIT assistant professor Ian Schreiber's talk on how you can teach students the basics of balancing games. In "A Course About Game Balance" he'll present a summary of his college-level course in game balance, examining the major topics covered in the syllabus and a set of assignments that can be used to further build balance skills by putting the theory into practice.

Make time to check it out and you'll walk away with an understanding of the realistic scope of a battle-tested course in game balance, and the kinds of topics and assignments that might be covered in such a course were they to implement it at their own school.

Plus, in "Teaching Games With Games 3: Another Six Exercises in Play," a panel of experienced game designers and educators will each introduce a new classroom exercise they use to teach a different facet of games: programming, art, design, criticism and even game design education itself.

One of our best tools for teaching games are games themselves, and by attending this panel discussion you'll walk away with six easy ways to do just that.

For more details on these and all other announced talks (including full speaker lists and bios) head over to the online GDC 2016 Session Scheduler, where you can begin to build your conference week and later export it to the up-to-the-minute GDC Mobile App, coming soon.

GDC 2016 itself will take place March 14-18th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on GDC 2016, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

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