Summer Institutes

Scalable Game Design Summer Institutes bring together teachers and school administrators with leading-edge researchers in Computer Science Education who are developing highly effective and easy to use computational thinking curricula for classrooms.

Summer Institutes bring technology and content (STEM, Language Arts) teachers from primarily middle school (with limited spaces for elementary and high school teachers) together to learn how to use game design and simulation design for computer science education and computational thinking in a wide variety of classrooms.

Participants who apply and are accepted into the CU Boulder Summer Institute come to the University of Colorado, Boulder campus for up to a week of exemplar training in a game design curriculum with a track record of high success. Scalable Game Design has been successfully implemented by over 140 teachers impacting more than 12,000 students of all abilities and demographics. Thanks to the National Science Foundation's generous funding and support from AgentSheets, Inc. and the University of Colorado at Boulder, participants attend the Summer Institute for no charge and even receive a stipend once the classroom implementation is complete.

Each year new participants are challenged to learn and master 2D game design and gain confidence in teaching game design to students, all within in the first three days of the Institute. Then the experienced participants from previous years will attend the Summer Institute to learn computer modeling/creation of simulations in STEM subjects in an extremely fast paced, action packed two-day intermediate level training. The final 2 days of the Summer Institute is reserved for teachers highly experienced in Scalable Game Design to learn three-dimensional game design using AgenCubes software.

Summer Institutes are hands on, with the teacher becoming the student for the duration of the Institute. Content is presented by both the original developers of the project as well as classroom teachers with in-the-trenches experience teaching game design to students. Peer leadership and mentoring successfully motivates new teachers, who in turn gets students in school interested in computer science and game design, advanced game design (such as Sokoban, Pacman and Space Invaders), and computational science (building scientific simulations and using them to collect and analyze data). Throughout the Institute, teachers learn about effective pedagogy, how to create lesson plans, and create a supportive network with colleagues. Summer Institutes also instruct each teacher on the "how-to"'s of conducting research data collection in their classes, adding to a critical body of knowledge that has far-reaching national and international impact on education.

Due to the popularity and effectiveness of the program, Summer Institutes are now available as Professional Development workshops to schools and districts on a case-by-case basis, for a fee. The project partners with a school or district to train Teacher Trainers who can mentor others in their schools and districts, then assists and supports school-wide and district-wide implementation of the program.

[mailto:yasko.endo@colorado.edu Join our Mailing List] to receive periodic updates about the project.

Previous Summer Institutes

 * Summer Institute 2013
 * Summer Institute 2012 Schedule
 * Summer Institute 2011
 * Summer Institute 2010
 * Summer Institute 2009