Summer Institute Homework

Get Ready for Fast Paced Learning at the Summer Institute!
Hang on to your hats – The following is from project community volunteer and master SGD teacher Fred Gluck. He calls this your “pre-game” prep, so to speak and “it may be more than people really want to know, but at least it’s complete!”. Experienced teachers – this is a GREAT refresher before you come back to Summer Institute. [http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/wiki/Maze_Craze_Design 1. Explore Maze Craze Design]
 * This is a page on the Scalable Game Design wiki with links that describe how to create a very simple game. There is a link to the tutorial page. There is also a complete lesson plan for those who like that level of detail. In addition, there is a link to a compressed version of a project file that implements the tutorial (.zip file) that you can download to your computer and then open it in the AgentSheets application. Finally, there is a link to an online playable version of the project that you can run in your browser. Note, however, that the latter requires enabling the Java run time plugin within your browser. If that is of concern to you, then use the downloadable version. Note that you must drag/copy the entire folder within the compressed file to your desktop or Documents folder in order to run the project.


 * Feel free to follow the tutorial to implement the project. We will be making a project similar to this as a starting point for more advanced topics during the Institute, so doing a "sneak peak" will help get you up the curve more quickly.

2. You may also wish to browse through some of the other information on the Scalable Game Design wiki

3. Explore the center column in the box seen in the lower half of the wiki main page.

4. Look at the link to the Summer Institute.


 * There are links describing the research on which the Scalable Game Design project is based, discussions related to computational thinking, and much more.

5. Explore the link to the Scalable Game Design Arcade in the bottom of the left column of the wiki home page.


 * The Arcade contains more than 12,000 AgentSheets and AgentCubes projects created by students and instructors over the past several years.


 * The Arcade is organized by school, then class within school, then assignment within class. The "University of Colorado Boulder" school has arcades from the past Summer Institutes, as well as from classes taught at the University of Colorado to undergraduate and graduate students.


 * Most of the projects on the Summer Institute arcades are AgentSheets projects, as are almost all middle school projects on the Arcade. As with the "Maze Craze" project described above, you can play AgentSheets projects on the Arcade by clicking the "Play" tab when you have chosen a particular project.


 * Again, you must have Java enabled in your browser for this to work.

6. Download projects from the Arcade to your computer.


 * When you select a project file to download, click on the "Versions" tab. Then click on the project file name, after which you will see a link named something like version0.zip. (There may be multiple versions of a project if the author has uploaded updates, and there will be a separate entry in the arcade for each uploaded version.)


 * Note, that the downloaded compressed file contains several compressed files within it. The compressed project file will have a name like "Projectfile-mudslide.jennifer.zip". That is the file which you would decompress on your desktop to run in AgentSheets.

7. For the total Over-Achiever: we will be very briefly introducing AgentCubes, the 3-D version of the software, in the Summer Institute. Most schools, however, use AgentSheets for their classroom activities.


 * There are also AgentCubes projects on the arcades for the past two years of CU student class projects. If you wish to check out some of these, you will need to download AgentCubes from the Agentsheets.com website. Some AgentCubes on the arcade can be also played directly within a browser, but it depends on the complexity of the project and the browser. Google's Chrome browser seems to be able to run more AgentCubes projects than, for example, Firefox. AgentCubes projects, unlike AgentSheets, do not use Java.