Thought I would share what worked and what didn't in my experiment to use LD as a teaching event. We had a total of 1 teacher (me) and 8 students on our core team, with help from two adults bringing food and helping drop off/pick up students.

Location/Assets - Used my classroom with permission from our principal - I have 9 desktop All-In-One Dell pc's as well as 4 high end laptops (my personal ones from the years). - 5 full sized white boards around the room with hundreds of markers - Many desks to organize into configurations for food, meeting, drawing, and computing. - Two students brought their own laptops

Plan for Friday - Meet @ 6pm. - Brainstorm, eat, and break up into teams to create 2-3 games with the idea of continuing on with whichever game was turning out the best. - Use whiteboards, drawings, etc. to have game design document with plan of starting development in the morning.

Plan for Saturday - Meet @ 10am. - Split into teams - Work until 12pm with breaks for lunch and dinner.

Plan for Sunday - Meet @ 10am - Test and polish game with plan to be done by 6pm (it is a school night after all)

What actually happened - Students all stayed after school, crazy nerd fest from 3-6pm, and really did not want to go home, everyone brought sleeping bags and pillows for the second day - Brainstorming went pretty well but everyone was hyped about one idea after our elimination round, so we made one giant team instead of 2-3 smaller ones. With this came some serious management issues - Started working on assets immediately instead of waiting until the morning (they were too excited) - Everyone was most excited about story, art assets, music, etc. which left me with programming (not too unexpected) - Had to have breaks here and there for outdoor activities as well as media breaks (youtube videos, etc.) - I got too tired to safely drive by Sunday, so had to rely on some reinforcements from awesome teachers (Cooper and MaDd) to save me and make sure students got fed. - By Sunday, half of the students were pretty delirious.
- Students were in my room Monday still working on the game with me after school until we submitted @5pm on Monday. - We wanted 8 levels, each with its own target, but ended up with 4 (including the tutorial) and they all have the same target

Takeaway - Students asked when we were doing this again, so we succeeded on the student engagement front - People have been pretty positive in the comments, and while I don't think it is the beginning of a AAA franchise, I think our game is fun-ish

So if you want any more info on how things went, feel free to send me a message. Otherwise, hopefully some people can play our game some more. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittie-reaper-a-depressed-cat-tale