Hi Debi,
My name is Stephanie. I teach multimedia and art to high school students in Australia. I just finished a game making unit with my Year 11 class. We used Scratch. Have you used it before? It is quite easy to use and then you can upload your games to the site http://scratch.mit.edu/ and others can play and comment on them. The software is free to download.
I have attended a 3 day workshop on Games in Learning and I planning ways to incorporate games into my teaching. It is divided into game play, game study and game making.
Stephanie