Teaching code through art and design with MUGEN: the Mini UnGame ENgine

Teaching computer coding to students of art and design presents a unique context, with its own set of challenges, from affective factors like motivation and stress, to the cognitive load of coding itself. Such challenges can make even small projects daunting to learners and instructors. But our students also bring unique strengths to the table. They are often highly motivated to learn tools that expand their creative powers, and they have invaluable productive skills such as illustration, photography, and even project management, ripe to be magnified through code.

The Mini UnGame ENgine (MUGEN) is an attempt to bridge these challenges and opportunities by presenting art and design students with a simple, pedagogically friendly JavaScript library, developed by the author, that allows them to rapidly develop a small game-like interactive experience with a minimal amount of code. MUGEN offers teachers a flexible tool that can support an instructional approach focused on visual creativity, or an approach focused more on coding, or on an approach that balances the two.

This presentation will describe MUGEN’s design and aims, its state of development, and the tentative results of its deployment in a classroom setting. Possibilities for future development and applications will also be discussed. Perhaps above all else, the talk will inspire viewers to consider the potentials of making their own custom tools for the digitally inflected learning environment that characterizes art and design classrooms today.