Scalable Game Design and the Development of a Checklist for Getting Computational Thinking into Public Schools Alexander Repenning University of Colorado Computer Science Department Boulder 80309-430 +1 (303) 492-1349 [email protected] David Webb University of Colorado School of Education Boulder 80309 +1 (303) 492-0306 [email protected] Andri Ioannidou AgentSheets Inc. 6560 Gunpark Drive Boulder, CO, 80301, USA +1 (303) 530-1773 [email protected] ABSTRACT Game design appears to be a promising approach to interest K-12 students in Computer Science. Unfortunately, balancing motivational and educational concerns is truly challenging. Over a number of years, we have explored how to achieve a functional balance by creating a curriculum that combines increasingly complex game designs, computational thinking patterns and authoring tools. Scalable Game Design is a research project exploring new strategies of how to scale up from after school and summer programs into required curriculum of public schools through game design approaches. The project includes inner city schools, remote rural areas and Native American communities. A requirement checklist of computational thinking tools regarding curriculum, teacher training, standards and authoring tools has been developed and is being tested with thousands of students. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 Computer and Information Science Education General Terms Design, Human Factors, Languages Keywords Game design, computational thinking, computational science. 1. INTRODUCTION: THE SCALABLE GAME DESIGN INITIATIVE Scalable Game Design is an initiative with the goal to expand opportunities to motivate, engage, and educate students about Computer Science through game design, starting at the middle school level. For over 15 years, funded mainly by the National Science Foundation (NSF), we have carried out investigations on new approaches to programming resulting in game and simulation authoring systems such as AgentSheets [1, 2] and AgentCubes [3]. While the goal has largely remained the same, the degree of ambition has steadily increased, in that we have gradually moved away from communities of self-selected users towards what is perhaps the most challenging educational context: implementing new IT curricular as part of the regular public school program. The main goal of our latest NSF-funded ITEST project called “Reforming IT Education through Game Design: Integrating Technology-Hub, Inner City, Rural and Remote Regions” (iDREAMS1 for short) is to bring Computer Science to middle schools with the ultimate aim of developing a larger IT workforce. Numerous problems with existing high school advanced placement courses have been discussed [4], but Computer Science education at the middle school level has received comparably little attention. As a result, programming has almost completely disappeared from the middle school curriculum. Existing IT opportunities at the middle school level often include little more than keyboarding, web browsing, and use of application training. The rapidly increasing number of summer camps, after-schools programs, female and minority focused special programs, and computer clubs at the middle school level strongly suggests that there is a demand from students for such opportunities. Many, including numerous ITEST projects [5] and our own projects [1], have invested a great deal of time and effort in broadening participation through motivational extracurricular activities. We believe this is an important first step. However, we also believe that now is the right time to bring Computer Science into middle school curricula to develop a stronger and bigger IT workforce. One reason to do this is that motivational concerns need to be addressed at the middle school level, using early IT experiences to support future career choices. The middle school years are critical for students in reaching conclusions regarding their own skills and aptitudes [6, 7]. This is the age at which children prematurely and often falsely conclude that math and science is not for them, or that Computer Science is all about programming or is a field that is hard as well as boring. Another reason to do this is to expose all students, including minorities and women, to Computer Science at a level of participation that no combination of extracurricular programs could achieve. After all, one should not forget that participation in extracurricular programs is based on self-selection and typically involves additional fees. Students showing up at these events usually are already excited about information technology. What about the large majority of students who are skeptical towards IT or may not have the resources to participate? While many extracurricular programs have been successful, they only reach out to a small subset of children compared to the number of students enrolled in middle schools. Skepticism towards programming in schools [8] is entirely justified. A student running towards us when we entered a school with an early prototype of the LEGOsheets [9] perhaps best summarized the programming in school situation in 1996. Excited to see the LEGO blocks, he asked us what we would be doing. We explained we would do programming. “Programming, oh no!” he replied, “I know what is going to happen. The teacher writes a program onto the blackboard, we type it into the computer and it 1 http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGCSE’xxx, xxx, xxxx, USA. Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-59593-947-0/08/0003...$5.10.never works.” This points out that programming, as an educational activity, must be heavily scaffolded, but also grounded in students’ interests,