{"id":2339,"date":"2013-12-09T12:17:01","date_gmt":"2013-12-09T20:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.nwp.org\/educatorinnovator\/?p=2339"},"modified":"2014-05-12T17:15:20","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T17:15:20","slug":"hour-of-code-scalable-game-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/hour-of-code-scalable-game-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Hour of Code: Scalable Game Design"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\"><em>By Joe Dillon, Instructional Coordinator for Educational Technology, Aurora Public Schools; Denver Writing Project\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The week of December 9 &#8211; 15th is <a href=\"http:\/\/csedweek.org\/about\" target=\"_blank\">Computer Science Education Week<\/a> and this year Code.org aims to have 10 million people engage in an <a href=\"http:\/\/code.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Hour of Code<\/a> to promote computer science education. In Aurora Public Schools (APS), middle and high school technology teachers will highlight the work of students who are learning to design video games in a project called <a href=\"http:\/\/sgd.cs.colorado.edu\/wiki\/Scalable_Game_Design_wiki\" target=\"_blank\">Scalable Game Design<\/a>, a research effort from the University of Colorado at Boulder\u2019s Computer Science and Education departments.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">With Scalable Game Design students gain their \u00a0first exposure to coding by building a game patterned after Frogger, the classic arcade game. With Frogger as a model, or a mentor text, \u00a0students create the graphics and program the game in a few days. After completing a Frogger-like game, students have the familiarity with Agent Sheets, the programming software, and the design approach of building a game by first studying a professional model and other student models.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The research side of the project \u00a0aims to first study the interest level of students in designing and programming games after completing just one design. Instead of taking traditional approaches to computer science education that have historically served a small set of mostly male students who self-select computer classes, Scalable Game Design aims to also hook girls and students of color by exposing larger numbers of students to accessible, engaging programming projects. The hope is that instead of seeing programming as boring and hard, which research shows is the majority of students\u2019 opinion of programming, students will find game design rewarding and fun while they develop computational thinking and gain the skills needed to build increasingly sophisticated games and simulations.<\/p>\n<p>In Thursday\u2019s <a href=\"\/webinars\">Educator Innovator webinar<\/a>, we\u2019ll hear from APS teachers who have implemented game design in their classroom as well as the district \u00a0technology leaders who hope to see the project grow. They\u2019ll reflect on the successes and challenges that come with supporting students in coding games and simulations, and they\u2019ll share about the role creativity and writing play in their game design instruction.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Joe Dillon, Instructional Coordinator for Educational Technology, Aurora Public Schools; Denver Writing Project\u00a0 The week of December 9 &#8211; 15th is Computer Science Education Week and this year Code.org aims to have 10 million people engage in an Hour of Code to promote computer science education. In Aurora Public Schools (APS), middle and high [&hellip;]<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on wp_trim_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on wp_trim_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":2303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,41],"tags":[103,104,113,137,148],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2339"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3320,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339\/revisions\/3320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}