Alyson Katz

School
Louisville Middle School/ Manhattan Middle School

How will I introduce Scalable Game Design in my school?
With enthusiasm and excitement for authentic meaningful 21st century learning!!!

What I have done in the past?
Click here to see

Plan for Scalable Game Design
K-12

1. The plan is to introduce Agentsheets to the 6th grade computer exploratory class in the last week of a 6 week rotation. Each day there is a 49 minute class. They will follow the 5 day frogger tutorial (see lessons below)

2. Introduce a 4 week unit into the semester Computer Power class. These classes will be 49 minutes each. It will begin with socrataic seminar then design and continue following the computational thinking model along with Agentsheets. Students will create 2 games using tutorials and then a 3rd game collaboratively and a 4th independent game.

7th/8th grade

HIgher Ed

Introduce computational thinking into Educational Technology graduate classes. Instructional Design - use this in the research cycle

Technology for Educators - have students follow similar 1 week plan above and evaluate agent sheets in education and business worlds

Software Eval - students will evaluate the product for its usage in their profession.

What is computational thinking? 

Lessons
[[Media:Frogger_Lesson_Plan_Day_1-amk-.pdf‎|Frogger Day 1]]

[[Media:Frogger_Lesson_Plan_Day_2_amk.pdf|Frogger Day 2]]

[[Media:Frogger_Lesson_Plan_Day_3_amk.pdf|Frogger Day 3]]

[[Media:Frogger_Lesson_Plan_Day_4_amk.pdf|Frogger Day 4]]

[[Media:Frogger_Lesson_Plan_Day_5_amk.pdf|Frogger Day 5]]

Project Journal
summer 2011 update I have now been teaching agentsheets for 3 years in the classroom. What I have found is that it is a fantastic educational teaching tool for 21st century learning that engages the students beyond my expectation. I tend to see this project through the lens of an educational technologist and find the potential is exponential and exciting. At this session I was able to view and talk with teachers from various subjects creating products to engage, motivate and educate their students. The teachers(in the summer program) were having such fun with their learning and were so focused as to how this can work in their classrooms. As for me I am running a summer camp with agentsheets with Sandy Wilder. It is a blended module with most of it being online. I was pleased (and overwhelmed with the response to the online program. In my middle school I look forward to enhancing my use of agentsheets by tying use of the product such as the burning forest and then use that with an environmental unit.

Rotation 1 6th grade The good news is we did program the basic frogger game and the students loved the experience.

a few notes: One week is not enough time to do it all. There is a fair amount of organization involved and I would recommend 2 weeks so there is enough time for the students to focus on creating the game and have enough time to understand the basic concepts

Hand out permission forms several weeks in advance and get the pre-survey in about 2 weeks before. This gives you time to get things in order. I would leave 3 days for uploading as we never got a chance to do that and take the post survey. If you are done early then the students can advance

Rotation 2 6th grade This rotation went a bit better. I had 30 students and was on my own though I did expect to receive some assistance as this was scheduled months ago. The project was started a week early to get the students pre-survey and explanations of the project. It was great to introduce the unit with Sandy's PowerPoint and then play some of the frogger games in the arcade.

An 8th grade student from the summer program that I know well stopped in to help. The students were at a variety levels and asked to be able to work at their own pace. I began the class as a whole and then let them go on their own. There were a few students that caught on fast and were helpers.

The unfortunate part is many computers kept freezing and students were out of space to save but these are BVSD issues. There was no time to upload the programs to the arcade as this was the last day of the rotation. I have opened my room at lunch for those students who want to come and try to finish up.

All in all this is a great exciting learning experience but it is difficult to do on your own with 30 students and the restricitons from BVSD.

7th/8th grade This went much better, nothing like a bit of experience tohelp things. For the whole the students really took off on the learning and are spreading the word to their peers and parents. The problem is.... they get ahead of me and then I go home and try to figure it out at night. It was exhilerating to watch their sharing,collaboration,and excitement with this learning

June 7,2010 Day 1 Getting back to learning....it puts things in perspective to see and feel what the students do. I found that since teaching agentsheets for the last year I was ready to move forward and the class showed me how to do this

June 8,2010 Day 2 Yea diffusion now makes sense thanks to Sandy's awesome instruction. AI scared me and now I can understand it. My goal is to be able to get enough of an understanding to program these on my own since I still need the help of the tutorials. I am learning!!!!!!! and looking forward to implementing the new techniques for my students.

June 9,2010 This was a busy day. It was really helpful to debug the programs and find some of those "common errors" so we can quickly and efficiently help others. The rubric creation made us think about what we are looking for, our expectations for the learners. I shared the free online rubric creator rubistar.4teachers.org which worked well. Pacman can get very complex but doesn't have to be so it can work on many levels for the learners.

June 10, 2010 This was an interestin day. It was great to tie it all together with the collaboration in the morning. There were so many ideas shared and it was a big help to get the lessons going to give ourselves and others a direction. the simulations were great in helping me think of ways to integrate agentsheets into the content area. This was especially helpful for me as I will be team teaching with content teachers and they are looking forward to tech integration.Zola.....well that sums it up, he's terrific. Glad to see the implementation schedule. good day

implementation schedule

At this time I do not have a schedule to work with. I am hoping to have one before school begins but the Principal has not completed the master schedule. I will teach at the end of each 6th grade rotation but do not know how long the rotations are at this time. It will also be implemented in another class but that is up in the air also.