Brandon Laird

School
4th grade, La Veta Elementary

How will I introduce Scalable Game Design in my school?
I will introduce scalable design to my academic community by collaborating with a colleague primarily, and then by introducing a summer "Game Design" class secondly. The last stage (in theory) will be introducing this as a regular portion of the class week, or as an after school program.

Project Journal
Day 1, Monday:

Pretty awesome in general, and no great frustrations. I definitely felt challenged but successful in the task at hand. One thing to note, make sure that there are no empty rule boxes in the behavior tab of your agents. I also think that my version of Frogger was pretty rad, but I am sure that is how most feel when they produce their first digital offspring.

I can definitely see some extrinsic gains from introducing this to my students, but to be honest, it requires a significant amount of time, so I will need some more concrete data if I am to sell this to my administration as a daily, or even weekly installment to the students that I teach.

I also think that they should use a large timer, or projected clock to time the progression of the seminar, as well as a call and response technique to marshal the attention of all students at the seminar when making announcements. I felt that many times people seemed a little lost when they moved on, but I guess this is the purpose of having so many "helpers." Unfortunately most regular (k-12)teachers I know are solo when teaching.

Looking forward to the Agent Cubes portion of this seminar.

Day 2, Tuesday:

Still pretty rad, but also pretty tired. The second day is definitely a challenge in the same way that the first day was. I think that I am at my fatigue level. My interest in learning new processes is definitely at a max, and I would really like to just play with what I have already learned so that I don't forget, because I am worried that is exactly what will happen.

I need to start applying what I have learned in a different way (I think) so that I can retain what I have already learned.

This seminar definitely falls within the Cone of Learning's higher tier, so kudos to the planners.

Also...

Fred loaned us solar eclipse glasses to watch the transverse of Venus. How cool is that?

Day 3, Wednesday:

Pretty good day for decompression, in that we did not do any actual construction on Agent Sheets. Went over what we had learned from the previous session, talked about application to the real-life classroom, expectations about data collection, as well as covered some of the major obstacles that students might/probably will encounter. I am sort of starting to get some basic ideas about how to implement this in an after school prograams.

I am a little nervous at the prospect of recollecting all of the processes for even completing the Frogger game, but I feel much more confident about its use after playing with the software during today's session. Having been shown where a fantastic tutorial is located on the wiki definitely boosted my confidence in using Agent Sheets.

I am really eager to begin Agent Cubes.

Day 4, Thursday:

Bob is pretty rad, in fact; I am pretty sure he could be labeled as a Rad-Rope-Wrangler. His delivery although fast-paced was very well delivered. This is not to say that the other speakers were not excellent--the were. I suppose I would say his style fits my learning method fairly well, and he taught me a couple of cool knots.

We learned some things on the STEM side today. We had an introduction to computational thinking, and building models to represent certain phenomena.

Day 5, Friday:

Bob spoke/instructed on the subject of advanced computational thinking today. Did some more models of real world phenomena. We explored things like sorting, tracking data, creating triggers, and others. I have definitely noticed that I am understanding much more about Agent Sheets, and how its software works.

Learning how to model real world phenomena is pretty awesome, and definitely applicable to education.

Day 6, Saturday:

Day 7, Sunday:

Contact Information

 * [mailto:brandon.laird@laveta.k12.co.us]