[A video game that teaches you how to code]
What I
love and what I'm passionate about is
finding better ways of teaching programming —
especially to kids. I really love this
term "chocolate-covered broccoli"
and I think that's what educational
video games have been up until now —
I mean it really has been
"Oh look! It's a game — just kidding! You can
play for a second and now go solve this
math problem for 10 minutes." 
The big difference between
a "chocolate-covered broccoli" game and a real immersive educational video game
is that you shouldn't have to stop
playing to go to the learning
and then stop learning to go to the playing.
So the first level of CodeSpells that
we ever built
was literally just this dark forest with
one gnome,
one crate and one spell. And we actually
tested it out.
We had forty middle school girls and we
just kind of gave them tasks to do and said,
"Try to get the crate to do this and try
to get it to do that."
So we started to understand how kids would interact with this. After that we decided
to add in a spellbook
and the spellbook really was our sneaky
way of putting in a textbook
into the game. The students have a problem in front of them — you have to figure out
how to collect all the bread.
Now you got the spellbook as a resource,
why don't you go look into that I and
see what you could use to be able to
collect all the bread.
Using Scratch, Alice and CodeSpells
are really important because what they do
is they provide a visual context for the
programming
The students make some change in the
program and immediately can see the
effect of that change.
Usually what I'll have the kids do
is some paperwork first and what I found
is that getting the kids to actually
write the spells down on paper — it's a
slower process and they actually think
about it more
and then when they go on the computer,
they actually can write the spells
very, very quickly. Pair programming is an
industry
standard practice. You have two people on one computer. And the driver is in charge
of the keyboard and mouse
and really focuses on the low-level
things — typing everything in and getting
everything to work.
The Navigator is then able to focus on
kind of the high-level things.
Not only
is it in industry standard practice that we
want them to start working on
but because they have to articulate what
it is that they want
they start to use the language of
computer science a lot more expert like.
We have them switch every two minutes
just because it's all about building
something as a team.
Collaboration. Communication. They're
not often related
with programming or computer scientists,
but they're absolutely critical
to software. Depending on the
school you go to, if there's an
instructor there who's
really passionate about computer science, they might have a course
otherwise it's generally not within the
curriculum
and there's a lot of reasons for this.
One of them is that the people who are
teaching don't have that programming
expertise
and so one of the things I'd like to do
is come up with curriculum and
softwares
such that they can teach in a classroom of 30 kids
without having to be programming
experts. And we really like to engage
the kids
in what we like to call "STEAM" — science,
technology, engineering,
art and math. Everything related to STEM,
you're going to have to have some
creativity
it's also really important to show that
especially computer science can be
expressive.
Have the kids engaging in solving
problems, but not just contrived "here
build a calculator that we've had for
however many years" but instead let's build something you're interested in.
Let's try to make a video game. Let's
make a comic strip but have each block
be moving around and when you click on
the cat it meows.
Getting them to be self-motivated and
excited about what they're doing so that
they want to go home and keep doing it
and it's not just something that they do
in the classroom. So what do you think?
Are there other ways we can use video
games in the classroom? Let us know in
the comments below
and if you want to learn more about the
ways that scientists use art,
watch this video here.
