Discussions

Name and Title: Mark Suter, Teacher

School: Pandora-Gilboa High School, Ohio, USA

Presenting From: Pandora, OH, United States (EST)

Language: English

Target Audience(s): Grades 4-12 Computer Technology Teachers

Short Session Description (one line): Game Design as an Intro to Computer Science for grades 6-12

Full Session Description:

By using Google Hangouts on air to pair up students from different countries and cultures, students work together with a common goal of making a video game. Each team of 2-4 students takes on roles such as “character design” , “programmer”, “sound design”, etc. Communications and team progress will be tracked within a password-protected Padlet.com wall, allowing students to insert images and comments to one anothers games.

By pairing students from multiple countries, the time zone difference will be accommodated by working asynchronously with the option to meet synchronously in monitored Google Hangouts with a teacher, allowing screen sharing and communicating.

The primary purpose of this ongoing process is to make connections between students of different cultures, allowing them to communicate their own cultures’ values and give students a sense of the global community that exists outside of their own local school district. This knowledge transfers to students entering a world that works together to produce products with interdependencies between workers in different locations.

By designing a video game as a first-look at computer science concepts, students learn CS concepts before having a chance to be intimidated by them. In this session, I will share my resources and methods for teaching the free GameMaker Studio to grades 6-12 while explicitly making connections to computer science concepts.

My goal is to provide students with an honest look into the joys and challenges of computer science early to make more informed course and career decisions based on experience rather than stereotypes and assumptions.  I am not recruiting CS students, but rather giving them an initial (hopefully positive) experience to pique their interests.

In collaboration with an out-of-state colleague, Mr. Steve Isaacs (@Mr_Isaacs) and I have creating a series of video tutorials for students and teachers to learn the free software. We have made the entire student experience a game by embedding these videos into “quests” within the 3DGameLab (3dgamelab.com) quest-based learning platform that allows students to complete quests which unlock options for them to choose from, earning XP (experience points) along the way to level up and unlock even better/harder quests.

The main computer science topics to be learned by the student using the game-design method:

• Game Planning (This is a more relevant/effective concept AFTER learning the first simple game without a plan)
• Objects, Sprites, Rooms, Sound
• Events (CS concepts: loops)
• Actions (CS concepts: declaring variables, calling variables, manipulating variables)
• Parent/Child Objects to take on characteristics, shorten code (CS concepts: succinct code)
• Sprite Editing (CS concepts: user interface design)
• Debugging (CS concepts) error interpretation, locating and systematically resolving errors)
• Exporting to different formats (CS concepts: Compiling your program for distribution)
• Feedback Implementation (CS concepts: Development cycle-Alpha, Beta, Release Client, Public Release)

Presenter Background:

Mark is a computer tech teacher for grades 6-12 in Ohio where he teaches multimedia and programming. His classroom is a hybrid of a mad-scientist’s laboratory and a circus. Mistakes are encouraged, and all projects are hands-on for experiential learning. He’s been teaching with GameMaker for 5 years, and is a Guild Officer (along with Steve Isaacs) in the TeenGameLab.com summer camp hosted in 3DGameLab.

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session: https://sites.google.com/site/mrsuterstechlab/

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