League of Legends Maker Produces Free Game Design Lessons

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/02/2019

Riot Games has introduced a free game design curriculum for educators that meshes with well known learning standards. The course can be taught, according to the maker of esports favorite League of Legends, by "any teacher with access to the internet and a printer."

Intended primarily for high schoolers, the course uses a simple framework to outline the basics of game design. Students work through interactive workshops created by the company's own game designers to learn concepts such as goals, opposition, rules, interaction and balance; then they work in groups to design a paper prototype of a multiplayer game.

The curriculum was adapted from a college-level course designed by Stone Librande, a senior game designer at Riot Games. Now it's available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This isn't Riot's first foray into education. The company launched URF Academy in 2016, an in-person game design workshop for high school students, held at its headquarters in Los Angeles and which expanded to regional offices.

The new material includes five modules with nine lessons and a final project module with five lessons. Each lesson takes about 60 minutes. It addresses myriad education standards, including those from the Common Core, Next Generation Science and CTE Model Curriculum.

The URF Academy Online curriculum is openly available on the Riot Games website.