Episode # 70
Game Design in the Classroom with Don Hileman
April 8, 2025
About This Episode
Guests
Don Hileman
Don Hileman is an educator and technologist with a deep passion for game design, VR, and real-time 3D technology. His programming journey began at the age of 9 on a Commodore 64, igniting a lifelong fascination with technology. After spending several years in the VR industry, Don now channels his expertise into the classroom, guiding students in game design, Unreal Engine, and immersive technology, while nurturing creativity and problem-solving skills.
Transcript
Kara 0:00
Today’s episode is sponsored by Learning Blade. Middle school is the ideal time for career exploration. With Learning Blade, you can easily integrate STEM and career awareness concepts into your classroom. Find out if this resource is free in your state at learning blade.com thanks, Learning Blade. Hey. Is this thing on? Are we recording? Can I get a tech person?
Caryn 0:29
Oh, for the love of Ed Tech.
Kara 0:35
Joining me today is Don Hileman, educator and technologist at Bio-Med Science Academy, and I’m super excited that Don’s joining us today, because we’re gonna find out about his journey into education via the gaming industry. So hey, Don, how are you?
Don 0:55
I’m doing good. How about yourself?
Kara 0:57
I’m good. Thank you, and thanks so much for joining me.
Don 1:02
Oh, thank you for having me.
Kara 1:03
Yeah, for sure. So talking about the gaming industry, how did you end up in education?
Don 1:12
It’s kind of a, kind of a long story.
Kara 1:16
Okay,
Don 1:17
I was always in tech. I have always worked in tech. I’ve been doing tech since I was little. I think I programmed my first game on a Commodore 64 computer at nine.
Kara 1:28
Oh my gosh.
Don 1:28
So yeah, I’m kind of showing my age there a little bit. But long story short, my wife and I had started our own studioback around 2014 2015, and we were focused in virtual reality. At that point, it was so new that there wasn’t even anything out on the market yet. You had to be a developer to get dev kits.
Kara 1:50
Oh, wow!
Don 1:51
Yeah. So we started with something we heard. We kept hearing this, this word come around, Oculus, Oculus, Oculus. And I’m like, What the heck is this Oculus? And I started reading up on it, and I found it was virtual reality. And I’m like, I gotta get one of those. So I ended up ordering one. And back then, computers were not ready for VR, so we had to build a computer just to run this thing.
Kara 2:15
Oh my gosh.
Don 2:16
Oh yeah. The minute I put that thing on, though, and I was in that world, and I could look around, and I was like, immersed in it. I was sold, I told my wife, I said, This is it. This is the future right here. This is going to change how we work, live and play. And couple months later, we decided to start a studio, and we started in our basement, and we got rolling with things. And because virtual, virtual reality was so hot back then, our company took off really fast. Within a year and a half’s time, we had a studio. We had, I believe, six employees. We had a small recording studio, we had a small motion capture studio, and we were being featured on, like, Playstations website and their YouTube channel. We were being featured, like, one time there was a a reporter from the largest newspaper in Germany that came into our studio and interviewed us, and we ended up being on the front page of that newspaper. Can’t tell you what it said, because it was all in German, good or for better or worse, but you know, everything was really taken off. And the problem was, was we were just so early, and we just we ran out of funding. And right around that time, I was asked to come and be a guest speaker to talk about the game industry and VR stuff at one of the local career tech schools.
Kara 3:36
Oh, nice,
Don 3:37
Yeah. So I went out there, and I was only supposed to be there for maybe an hour, and I ended up spending most of the day there it was. It was so exciting. The kids were they were excited. They had a lot of questions. They couldn’t wait to show me the things that they were working on. And it was amazing. I came home and I told my wife, I said, This is amazing. I said, I wish I could do this every day. This is so much fun to work with them and show them the things that I know, and watch them do it, and their their take on it, and how they’re taking what I’m showing them and going in different directions. And it just so happened at the exact same time, there was another career tech that was looking for somebody to take over their technology program. And I didn’t understand how career tech worked. I thought I had to go to school to be a teacher, which you do. But it’s different with Career Tech. You get hired in you they base it off of your industry experience. You have to have at least five years experience, and then you go to school while you’re teaching. And so I, long story short, I got offered the job, and I went to school at Kent State University and got my career tech license. And at that time, the program was they were teaching junior, I was teaching juniors software and hardware, and then seniors, I was teaching networking and networking security. And we were not getting, yeah, we were. Were getting good enrollment numbers. We were getting about four or five students a year. Historically, that’s all they were getting to sign up for it. So towards the end of my first year, I was really lucky. I had a good principal, and I said, you know, can we change things up? This is not working. And he goes, what do you have in mind? I said, Let’s go off of my experience. Let’s go into game design. I said, we’re fighting with the kids every day to keep them off the games instead of fighting with them. Let’s embrace them and let me teach them how to program. Let me teach them file management, let me teach them all these things. And I was really lucky. He said, Let’s do it.
Kara 5:31
Oh that’s awesome.
Don 5:33
Oh yeah. The following year, we had like over 60 students sign up for the program, so it exploded, and I worked there up until last year, and it just so happened that biomed Science Academy had an opening, and they were looking for a seventh grade technology instructor. And I went out for the interview, and it was just something different about that school. It’s, you walk around it, it reminded me more of Google. It’s just wow, different, yeah, different kind of school, and I just, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I told my wife, I said, Wow, I really, really want to be there, and things just end up lining up perfectly. And a position opened up and they called me, and that’s how I got to where I’m at right now.
Kara 6:16
Oh my gosh, how cool. And I love that the kids were so excited. And you took like, that approach to kind of like, meet them where they are, in the sense of what they were interested in.
Don 6:27
Oh, it’s a lot easier to teach them when they’re when they buy into what they’re doing. And the kids, they love gamedesign. But here’s the thing, a lot of people think game design is just all fun and games, the amount of things you have to know, and the knowledge you have to have to create a game. I mean, there’s story writing, there’s there’s obviously the programming, there’s 3d art, there’s animation, there’s physics, there’s there’s so many different things. And the students, they end up, when they do this, they end up learning how to think differently, because they have to think through problems. They have to get really great problem solving skills. It’s, it’s really good for them. And honestly, the game design industry is a huge industry. There are careers out there where these kids can go on and have six figure year jobs.
Kara 7:16
Yeah, which is great. I mean, especially if they like it and yeah, like you said, the skills, I mean, it’s more than just just playing games, yeah, yeah, just playing games, I guess, yeah, that’s, that’s the best, wording.
Don 7:33
I see it is, if a student could program a game, they could program anything, because they’re learning how To program, how to think like a programmer, plus programming games, that’s that’s real time. That’s real time technology. So their programming has got to be really clean and very optimized to be able to hit those 60 frames per second. Whereas software is not real time, you you have to be really good at software. But it’s a little more forget forgiving then say something that’s running like virtual reality or augmented reality or games or training simulations, any of that real time stuff.
Kara 8:09
Yeah, that’s I’m, yeah, I just, I guess I’m taking this all in, because I’m like, amazed thinking about high school kids doing this kind of stuff.
Don 8:21
Well, what’s really cool is that biomed, we did it with seventh graders.
Kara 8:24
I was gonna say middle school. Now that’s
Speaker 1 8:27
Yeah, we didn’t, and we didn’t know how they were gonna do with it. And I really didn’t know, because I’m used to teaching 11th and 12th grade, yeah, and I had a feeling that they would pick it up. We taught them unreal or I taught them Unreal Engine this year. And Unreal Engine is Industry Program. They use that to make Mortal Kombat. They use it to build Fortnite. They used it to build all the Batman Arkham games. So it’s a major piece of software to learn. And we have seventh graders that are not just learning it. But I mean, the things that are coming out of my room right now is amazing. It’s, it’s really blowing my mind, what they’re what they’re doing, what they’re creating. I had a student the other day. He showed me something, and I kid you not, it looks like it came off one of the professional stores, like I thought I was about ready to start yelling at him, because I thought he downloaded a game and was playing it, and here it was his. And it’s, it’s very exciting to work with them, and it’s just seeing what they come up with and what they create. It’s amazing.
Kara 9:26
Wow. Okay, so how has your background in game development influenced the way that you teach game design, animation and motion capture?
Don 9:40
I think my coming from the game industry, I know what, what the students really need to know. Because sometimes, sometimes in education, there’s things that we’re given that we have to teach standards, stuff like that. Those don’t always align perfectly with what. The actual industry is especially in tech, because it can align this week and next week. Everything can change and shift. And I think having that background, and, you know, going through a lot of those ups and those downs with running a studio, and when we were on top and then going down in it, you know, launching and publishing, those are all real world experiences that I could bring to the classroom, and I could tell the students, tell the students, you know, I use a lot of stories in my classroom when we were at the studio, this happened. The reason I’m teaching you this is because this is what happened to us, and I think it adds a little bit of context to what I’m teaching,
Kara 10:33
yeah, which I think is extremely useful for them to know that kind of background. So can you maybe just list some of those real world skills that you either prioritize or you feel like they are gaining from this?
Don 10:55
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I’m really big about in my class is I love when the students are trying to do something new that we haven’t learned in class. But I’ll have 100 students to be coming to me and wanting, how do I do this? And it’s some advanced coding. And if I try to figure out all that coding every day, my brain would explode. So one of the things I teach them is, you know, Google it, if you could learn how to use Google and know what key terms to use to find what you want fast, you could do anything. And you know, I always tell them, You got pretty much a university right in front of you with YouTube, anything you want to know, you could learn from there. So that’s definitely one of them. And then just the problem, you know, the troubleshooting and the problem solving skills, because I tell them all the time, if you’re not breaking code, you’re not coding. And that journey that it’s going to take you to find the answer, you’re going to learn 50 zillion different things that don’t pertain to your problem, but you would never learn those if you didn’t have that problem and you weren’t trying to find that answer. So those are definitely some of the some of the things. And then I bring in a little bit of project management with them, where, you know, you can’t just work on this forever. There is a deadline, and if you don’t hit that deadline, here’s what happens. And I’m hoping that a lot of these students, when they leave, they graduate and they leave the school, that even if they don’t go into game design or programming, that some of those things will help them in their everyday careers.
Kara 12:20
Yeah, I like that. I like that so much. Teachers, you can now earn contact hours toward grad credit for listening to the podcast.
Caryn 12:30
Visit for the love of edtech.org, for more information.
Kara 12:33
So can you walk us through how students engage with the game design and animation, kind of like what a day or a project kind of like looks for them, looks like for them?
Don 12:45
Yeah, yeah. Well, in my class, what we do is we’ll start on a project together.
Kara 12:51
Okay,
Don 12:51
And we’ll do, we’ll do the coding together. And what I do is I bring it up on my big screen, and they can see it. But then I also use Google meet, and I’ll broadcast my desktop to all of there so that they could see it up close. And we’ll write code together, and I’ll explain every piece of it why we’re doing it. And sometimes I’ll purposely mess it up and it won’t work, and I’ll say, you, I don’t know what’s going on. And then have those couple students, Oh, Mr. H, you forgot to do this, or you forgot to do that, and it brings in a whole different level of learning, and they’re learning from each other, and now it’s at a point where we’ll get done and I have them work on a project on their own, and I’m seeing students coming together, and they’re helping each other out, and some of the features that they’re adding to their games, I’m looking at like that took a lot of thought, and it’s way beyond Anything that we’re learning in class, but that’s how we do. We work together. And the one student, one time, it was funny, she goes, not learning anything. You’re showing me, what the program? I said, What’s a function? She goes, What’s a list of actions? I said, What holds values? She goes, a variable. I said, What kind of variable is a whole number one in I said, You did learn things. I said, we’re working together, and you’re not so hyper fixated on trying to remember the code you’re learning how to code, once you learn how to code, you could jump from programming language to programming language.
Kara 14:14
So she was learning, what tools or software are they using? So I’m assuming Unreal Engine is one of them.
Don 14:24
Yes, okay, we’re yet we’re using real engine in the class. Some of the students are starting to break into 3d now, and they’re using blender, and both of those are industry standard programs. Actually Unreal Engine, Disney plus is using it when they’re filming that show the Mandalorian. So what they’ll do is they’ll use it. They won’t make games with it, because unreal engine could be used to make a lot of different things. They’re using it for something called virtual production, okay? And they have an they have an LED wall up, and they’ll have their actors in front of it, and then they design all these 3d worlds in a 3d program like the. Vendor or Maya, and they’ll bring them in. And the way Unreal engine works is it’s not like green screen, where it just knocks out the background. You can have things in front of the actors, behind the actors, to the side. They can interact with them. And that entire show is filmed using Unreal Engine. Some of the car companies, I believe it’s Lexus, are using Unreal Engine to design their cars, and what they’ll do is they’ll put a VR headset on, and they’ll walk around the car to see if they like the scale, that they like, the curves, the lines, all of that. And then once they do, then they go and start creating the molds and everything for it. Architects are using it where they’ll decide buildings for people. And now the clients come in, and they’ll put a VR headset on them, and they can walk through the entire building, and then with the controllers in VR, if they don’t like the floor, they could click, they could point at it and click, and it’ll go, say, from a wood floor to a tile floor to carpet. They could change the colors of the walls, and they could get this building to be exactly the way they want before it’s ever built. And so it’s, it’s being used in so many different ways, their VR, AR training, simulation, architectural visualization, so many different areas.
Kara 16:12
Wow. That’s That’s wild. That is really wild.
Don 16:17
And we have seventh graders at BioMed using that, which is just crazy, and they are thriving at it. They I’m so proud of those students and what they’ve been able to pick up. Because honestly, at the beginning of the year, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be too hard for them that they’re blowing me away right now with what they’re doing. It’s really cool. I have one student who has made a virtual museum in VR, and he’s taken all of his projects that he’s done in other classes, and he’s hanging them up in on the walls in this museum, where you could walk through it in VR and see his art projects and everything. It’s really cool.
Kara 16:52
That’s clever, yeah. What kinds of games are they making?
Don 16:59
As a class we’re making. It’s a rolling ball game where you control ball and you have to roll it through an obstacle course. Okay? And there’s a lot in that that they’re learning how to do, like UI, UX, they’re learning physics, or learning all that. But then in their free time, I’m looking around and walk around, and they’re making all different games. I have some people that are making like third person games. Some are making first person some are just designing worlds. So they’re, well, they’re working in their lab time, or not really free time, but their lab time, they’re exploring what interests them, okay, and just running with that. So we got, you could come in my class any day, and there’s probably 10 different projects going on at the same time.
Kara 17:43
Wow. This is like, this is so fascinating to me, because I just envision all of these young little learners, like engaging with all of this cool tech and creating like things that you know, we just don’t even imagine, because it lives in their brain.
Don 18:05
And that’s what’s, that’s what’s, that’s the fun part is the imaginations that they have and these worlds that they’re putting together and building. I just look at them, I wish I had a 10th of their imagination. I really do, because it’s, it’s really, really neat what they’re doing,
Kara 18:20
yeah. And for some reason, as I feel like, as we get older, you just kind of lose some of that. You know, as you you know are just out in the world, I guess. I don’t know why it disappears, or if you’re more aware of reality, or what, I don’t know what happens.
Don 18:41
I think we have we put maybe more limitations on us, or we put more reasons why we can’t do something, rather than going into it blindly and just saying, you know, I could do this, and not knowing everything that it entails,
Kara 18:55
yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. So how do you ensure students are learning relevant skills that will set them up for future careers.
Don 19:06
I try to keep my finger on the pulse with technology. I It’s kind of funny. I get up in the morning for work. I get up about an hour before I have to leave for work, and I sit and while I’m waiting to go to work, I watch YouTube, and I see what’s out there, what people are doing, but also I chat with industry people. I still have a lot of friends that are in the industry, and I’ll reach out to them and say, you know, what are you guys working on now? What are you guys doing? What’s what’s new, what’s coming around the corner, what haven’t I heard about yet? And that’s kind of how I stay in touch, because technology, as we know it changes by the week, sometimes by the day, especially with AI right now, and it’s just it’s hard to keep up with, but I rely on the people that I know that are the industry, and then also, like I said, YouTube, YouTube is like my best friend with things. There’s so many things you can learn off of there if YouTube. Could figure it out and take these people there creating content, and turn them into a college. It would probably be the best college around. It’s, it’s, it’s crazy how much you can learn just off of watching YouTube. Yeah, it
Kara 20:17
definitely is a good little teacher at your fingertips. What advice would you give to other educators looking to introduce game design into their curriculum?
Don 20:29
I would say, Just do it. I mean, the kids, it’s easy to get engagement with them, because it’s you’re you’re taking the curriculum to where they’re at, where they want to be, and it makes it a lot easier to introduce a lot harder curriculum to them, if you could tie it in with that. Plus Unreal Engine, for example, they have a week long summer course that they do for educators where they’ll give them curriculum, lesson plans, they’ll give them kind of a run through of how to do things in Unreal Engine to get them started. Unity 3d is another game engine that you know, they’re known for doing mobile games, ar, VR, pretty much everything you can imagine. They’re another one. They have a great educator community, and you can learn a lot from there. And educators that there’s a unity Facebook group, teachers will just share information with each other, or shared lessons that they did, or what’s working in class and what’s not. But honestly, I would just say, just, just set your mind that you’re going to do it and just do it. Because if you think about it, you’ll find a million reasons why
Kara 21:32
I was gonna say, I feel like that’s true about most things that sound scary.
Don 21:37
Just, yeah, and just do it and it is, and you don’t, and you don’t have to start with Unity or Unreal Engine. If you’re not comfortable with that, there’s engines like Scratch, for example, that is a great game engine to start with. It’s a lot easier to learn. And that could be an intro into something like Unity or Unreal, or go.or whatever. Ones are out there now that I’m not familiar with Yeah, so there’s and there’s so many resources online right now. Like I said, once again, YouTube, you could learn so much from YouTube. There’s websites like Udemy or pronouncing Skillshare, all of them have so much information on there. But, yeah, no, I think it’s a great thing, and the kids really like it. And you know what’s here’s the thing, if you can make learning fun, they’re gonna learn a lot. And for example, last week, I wanted to teach my seventh graders about GitHub and version control, which is a very dry, boring topic, but we are able to tie it into the games that they’re working on, and it made it a lot easier to teach them that. And I got students now that are now using GitHub Desktop to connect to an online repo in the cloud. They’re putting their game on there, they’re sharing it with their friends to collaborate, and they’re able to work on it at home. And, I mean, that’s very, very, very complicated to do. And if I tried to teach at a class just as its own lesson, they would have fell asleep, yeah, but because it’s taking it to where they want to be, I mean, they were there, they were paying attention, and they were able to do it. So, yeah, I think it’s a great thing in schools. I really do, and it’s, it’s the future, no matter whether we make it or not, things are going in that direction where there’s real time, 3d technology, immersive experiences. They’re claiming that the web 3.0 is gonna be a lot more immersive than what we’re even experiencing with the internet now. And I think, I’m not sure, but I think they’re gonna go into a lot of stuff with VR and AR and the metaverse. And I know the metaverse has had its ups and its downs and stuff, but I mean, Snoop Dogg bought a property in the middle Metaverse for $4 million there’s got to be something to it. Yeah, he Yeah. He bought a property for $4 million Wow, digital property that he’s gonna set up. And, you know, something to think about, too with all this stuff, is, what was it? Maybe five years ago, one of the, one of the music artists, I can’t remember his name now, Marshmallow. Oh yeah, his name was, he held a concert in Fortnite, and they had 10s of millions of people. Oh yeah,
Kara 24:27
that I remember that that world is like, you know, becoming it’s meshing more with ours, you know?
Don 24:38
Well, that was couple years ago, right after the Super Bowl, the Foo Fighters had a concert in metas, Horizon worlds, okay? And that was when it was really new, and I didn’t know what it was, and I thought, Okay, let me put on the VR headset. Let’s see what this is, yeah, and I was transported to this area that looked like. A convention center with all these doors on it, and different doors went to different things, like NBA games and stuff like that. And I was standing outside the door for the Foo Fighters concert, and all of a sudden I hear Hello, and I turn around with my VR headset, and there’s an avatar there. And I thought it was just an AI program one, and here it was somebody that was over in China, they were also attending that concert. And I thought to myself, wow, you know, we’ve always been able to watch these things, like through YouTube or something like that, but you you lose that experience part of being at a concert with people to the, you know, cheer with and talk to, and this is bringing that in, and I think, I think if they get it right, it could really change a lot of things, even like online education. You know, instead of students going to a website, just reading things on a website, or watching a video, or even zoom you can be in the classroom with a VR headset or AR goggles and actually participate. I think if they do it right, I think it could be really amazing.
Kara 26:06
Yeah, the possibilities are vast, for sure. Yes, okay, so this is kind of, I guess, an interesting question, really, because I’m assuming that we have listeners who are not teachers. So for industry professionals considering a move to teaching, what do you think they should know after taking kind of that path?
Don 26:36
It’s a different world. It’s a completely different world going from industry into teaching. Some people really love it. Some people don’t. I would suggest doing kind of like I did, if you could find somewhere where you could be a guest speaker and get to spend a day with the students and kind of see how what it’s like to interact with them, see if it’s for you. I think that’s the best step. And a lot of the schools and career tech everything, they’re always looking for guest speakers. So it’s not hard to do something like that, but I think that’d be the first step. And then, you know, just start looking and see if there’s openings. And, like, if you’re an industry person who doesn’t have a teaching degree, Career Tech is the way to go. You can get into career tech schools, and they have their own curriculum that you take while you’re teaching. So that’s really nice, because you can get into teaching quicker, and then you could, you know, be taken to classes, yeah, but yeah, I think the biggest thing is just get into a classroom and get to interact with the students and see if it’s something that you think you would like doing. And for me, it was just like, that day, it just something clicked with me. It’s like, oh, this is this is really cool. This is what I want to do. And I if you had asked me before that day, do you want to be a teacher, I’d have said, No way, yeah. Never had an interest in it. But then that day, it just something, something changed for me that day. And I think that’s that’s a great step to getting there? I think,
Kara 28:01
yeah, I think that’s really great advice. I think it’s really cool that you had that aha, like your aha moment, kind of in that space of being a guest speaker, and it kind of clicked, which is, I don’t know, I think a really cool thing to have happen to you. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was such a great conversation.
Don 28:27
Yeah, thank you for having me. It was really nice meeting you. Yeah, you too.
Caryn 28:31
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope you found our discussion interesting and insightful. Don’t forget to check out the show notes on our website, where you’ll find more information about today’s guest resources we mentioned and information on earning contact hours for listening.
Kara 28:48
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with your network and check us out at fortheloveofedtech.org This podcast is produced by SOITA, the Southwestern Ohio Instructional Technology Association, in partnership with ThinkTV and CET, the local PBS stations in Dayton and Cincinnati, until next time, keep exploring new ways to empower your students through tech, and we’ll catch you in the next episode.