With the IT crisis reaching alarming levels, it is more important than ever to attract K-12 students to computer science. 3D game development can be an enticing way to achieve that, but building 3D games is far from trivial. Students need to achieve a degree of 3D fluency in modeling, animation and programming to be able to create compelling 3D content. The combination of innovative end-user development tools and standards-based curriculum promoting IT fluency by shifting the pedagogical focus from programming to design, can address motivational aspects without sacrificing principled educational goals. The AgentCubes 3D game-authoring environment raises the ceiling of end-user development without raising the threshold. Our formal user study shows that with Incremental 3D, the gradual approach to transition from 2D to 3D authoring, middle school students can build sophisticated 3D games including 3D models, animations and programming.

The way programming is currently taught at the University level provides little incentive and tends to discourage student peer-topeer interaction. These practices effectively stifle any notion of a ‘learning community ’ developing among students enrolled in university level programming classes. This approach to programming education stands in stark contrast to the ‘middle school computer club ’ approach; As part of 10 years of research projects aiming to teach programming to middle school children, it is observed that middle school students in computer clubs freely share programming ideas, code, and often query one another and provide solutions to the various programming problems encountered. To enable these interactions at the university level, a novel online infrastructure has been developed over the past 6 years through use in the Educational Game Design Class at the University of Colorado Boulder. The culmination of the submission system, entitled the Scalable Game Design Arcade (SGDA), seems to foster the flow of ideas among students yielding an effective open classroom approach to programming education.

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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.

Visual programming languages can be used to make computer science more accessible to a broad range of students. The evaluative focus of current research in the area of visual languages for educational purposes primarily aims to better understand motivational benefits as compared to traditional programming languages. Often these visual languages claim to teach students computational thinking concepts; however, although the evaluations show that students may exhibit more enthusiasm, it is not always clear what computational thinking concepts students have actually learned. In this paper we attempt to develop a visual semantic evaluation tool for student-created games and simulations that goes towards depicting the computational thinking concepts implemented by the students. Through semantically analyzing a given student’s created projects over time, this visual evaluation tool, called the Computational Thinking Pattern (CTP) graph, can possibly indicate the existence of computational thinking transfer from games to science simulations. 1.

Computer games and simulations can be valuable teaching and communication tools, and they are a powerful form of self-expression. Unfortunately, creating games requires programming, and programming requires time and skill. Some tools facilitate game creation to motivate novice programmers, but programming is still necessary. Other systems require less programming, but they are narrowly focused. To enable faster, simpler, and more expressive tools for professionals and amateurs, we have explored the processes and tools used in the early stages of game and simulation design. Interviews with educators clarified the uses of simulations in the classroom, while interviews with professional game designers uncovered a need for a new medium for prototyping interaction. We also conducted a study that observed seven groups of children designing games with words, sketches, and animations, finding significant advantages to sketches and animations. Finally, we refined an interface optimization design technique and applied it to this domain as a first step toward a new game and simulation prototyping tool.