Monday, June 25, 2012

Teach Your Students Game Design in One Week

Teach Your Students Game Design in One Week is a one-hour class I attended Monday at ISTE in San Diego.  The course description reads: How can you introduce game design in your classroom if you have no programming background and only one week between keyboarding and PowerPoint lessons?
Well- let's find out!  This will be my first attempt at programming, ever.  I downloaded a free trial of AgentSheets software and I am ready to get started.... It seems to be a logic based process for this newbie- mostly if>then relationships. For example, if you are a pice of dirt and nothing is below you, then you will fall.

The purpose of the highly successful Scalable Game Design initiative (http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/gamewiki/images/b/b2/Scalable_Game_Design_summary.pdf) is to get computer science into public schools by motivating and educating students to learn about computer science and STEM topics through game design starting at the middle school level. Typically, middle school students are not exposed to computer programming. Computer courses are focused on keyboarding, multimedia and programs such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The result is that few students become interested in computer programming (if it is offered) at the high school level. As a nation we have a growing need for IT personnel and a declining enrollment in computer science programs.

The handout for the course is located here: http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu