research-article

Scalable Game Design: A Strategy to Bring Systemic Computer Science Education to Schools through Game Design and Simulation Creation

Authors:

Alexander Repenning,

Hilarie Nickerson,

Susan B. Miller,

Catharine Brand,

Ian Her Many Horses,

Ashok Basawapatna,

Kris Gutierrez,

Nadia RepenningAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), Volume 15, Issue 2

Article No.: 11, Pages 1 - 31

https://doi.org/10.1145/2700517

Published: 30 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

An educated citizenry that participates in and contributes to science technology engineering and mathematics innovation in the 21st century will require broad literacy and skills in computer science (CS). School systems will need to give increased attention to opportunities for students to engage in computational thinking and ways to promote a deeper understanding of how technologies and software are used as design tools. However, K-12 students in the United States are facing a broken pipeline for CS education. In response to this problem, we have developed the Scalable Game Design curriculum based on a strategy to integrate CS education into the regular school curriculum. This strategy includes opportunities for students to design and program games and science technology engineering and mathematics simulations. An approach called Computational Thinking Pattern Analysis has been developed to measure and correlate computational thinking skills relevant to game design and simulations. Results from a study with more than 10,000 students demonstrate rapid adoption of this curriculum by teachers from multiple disciplines, high student motivation, high levels of participation by women, and interest regardless of demographic background.

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Cited By

Huang K(2024)COMPUTER EDUCATION REFORM IN TAIWANNatural Science Education in a Comprehensive School (NSECS)10.48127/gu/24.30.1430:1(14-23)Online publication date: 28-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.48127/gu/24.30.14
Guss SClements DSharifnia ESarama JHolland ALim CVinh M(2024)Designing Inclusive Computational Thinking Learning Trajectories for the Youngest LearnersEducation Sciences10.3390/educsci1407073314:7(733)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14070733
Chen LNguyen H(2024)Study Trends and Core Content Trends of Research on Enhancing Computational Thinking: An Incorporated Bibliometric and Content Analysis Based on the Scopus DatabaseComputers10.3390/computers1304009113:4(91)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/computers13040091
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Index Terms

Scalable Game Design: A Strategy to Bring Systemic Computer Science Education to Schools through Game Design and Simulation Creation
1. Applied computing
  1. Education
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education
        Information science education

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computing Education

ACM Transactions on Computing Education Volume 15, Issue 2

Special Issue II on Computer Science Education in K-12 Schools

May 2015

142 pages

EISSN:1946-6226

DOI:10.1145/2767124

Editor:
Robert McCartney
University of Connecticut, USA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

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. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 30 April 2015

Accepted: 01 November 2014

Revised: 01 August 2014

Received: 01 April 2013

Published in TOCE Volume 15, Issue 2

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.48127/gu/24.30.14
Guss SClements DSharifnia ESarama JHolland ALim CVinh M(2024)Designing Inclusive Computational Thinking Learning Trajectories for the Youngest LearnersEducation Sciences10.3390/educsci1407073314:7(733)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14070733
Chen LNguyen H(2024)Study Trends and Core Content Trends of Research on Enhancing Computational Thinking: An Incorporated Bibliometric and Content Analysis Based on the Scopus DatabaseComputers10.3390/computers1304009113:4(91)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/computers13040091
Repenning AGrabowski S(2024)Scaffolding Creative Programming ProjectsProceedings of the 19th WiPSCE Conference on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research10.1145/3677619.3677634(1-6)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677619.3677634
Repenning ABasawapatna A(2024)RULER: Prebugging with Proxy-Based Programming2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00037(275-281)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
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