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[redredred]

Me and a couple of friends run a game development hobbyist community where I'm from. The game development scene over here isnt really developed, so you can say that I've been dealt the hand of trying to get people into game design. (I've only shipped like 2 games and not really good ones either).

So, as a not-so-experienced game designer, having a hand at training people who come from zero code experience, what do I do to help them learn? I know about Construct2, Game Maker and such, and those are handy tools for learning, but I have no experience in those. Should I go and experiment on them or have a much more abstract, more theory crafty approach with them and let them discover coding themselves?

[ProgramGamer]

Another approach would be to teach them game design with board games. Since you don't have to actually program anything in a board game, it allows you to focus on defining the rules, which is what game design really is about imo.

If people insist on programming however, then yeah, Game Maker has a good visual scripting editor for defining simple game rules.

[Rarykos]

1st board games and brain storming concepts. Try to abstract and package these concepts in tiny ideas, which could be made in construct. Using basic blocks and animations.

 Then teach them construct!

[pjsdev]

I've had some success teaching a short course by doing practical work with board games combined with case studies of digital games. Lesson one was about improving Tic-tac-toe.
I backed it up with a little theory (books etc.), which isn't appropriate for every settings, but might help.