Frogger First

There are many ways to engage students in Scalable Game Design, many ways to introduce the students to programming, computational thinking, game design.

For five years our project has successfully motivated, engaged, educated students through training classroom teachers to implement Scalable Game Design (SGD) starting the Frogger game.

As we grow, with the help of the same teachers, we are seeing a wonderful variance in how teachers bring SGD to their classrooms.

BUT, the project still is anchored in FROGGER FIRST paradigm for some really good reasons.

'''Below is the "Confessions of a Journey Junky" by Fred Gluck, a highly experienced and talented teacher working with after-school outreach with self-selected gaming classes at Science Discovery program at CU. '''

Here are the reasons I would proffer as the reasons for using Frogger as the starting point for most beginning school teachers and their classes:

1. Frogger is a game that is generally recognized and recognizable by a vast majority of people, particularly teachers, since it is one of the earliest video games and has been deployed on most computer platforms. Journey does not exist, per se, on any platform.

2. Frogger has a story line and characters that are generally appealing to and recognizable by students (frog, truck, river, logs, turtles, etc.); whereas, Journey's characters are more ambiguous (traveler, goal, chaser).

3. Frogger's well defined character concepts lead to unambiguous graphics. Journey's more ambiguous character concepts lead to less consistency. In addition, the Frogger story scenario, which results in the worksheet layout, is conceptually well structured; whereas, Journey is much more open-ended. Both considerations result in more consistency in final student output, so that it is easier for teachers to assess student work and for students to compare their work with others in a more objective fashion.

4. There are many implementations of Frogger that exist on the web, as well as one of the AgentSheets demonstration projects, that students can play to see what the game is supposed to do, so that there is an example to follow in terms of appearance and game scenario. Journey has far fewer implementations; they are only student projects on the SGD arcade; and they are widely varying in design, so that there is no "standard"; model to emulate.

5. From an AgentSheets implementation standpoint, because Frogger has been used so predominantly in the ITEST project, there are thousands of examples of implemented projects and dozens of tutorials for Frogger on the wiki to provide support to both teachers and students. In contrast, Journey has very little documentation on the wiki and very little documented student teacher experience.

I think the reasons above make a much stronger case for Frogger as the ongoing "routine"; starting project for most beginning teachers and introductory classes.

Fred Gluck, instructor Scinece Discovery