An educated citizenry that participates in and contributes to science technology engineering and mathematics innovation in the 21st century will require broad literacy and skills in computer science (CS). School systems will need to give increased attention to opportunities for students to engage in computational thinking and ways to promote a deeper understanding of how technologies and software are used as design tools. However, K-12 students in the United States are facing a broken pipeline for CS education. In response to this problem, we have developed the Scalable Game Design curriculum based on a strategy to integrate CS education into the regular school curriculum. This strategy includes opportunities for students to design and program games and science technology engineering and mathematics simulations. An approach called Computational Thinking Pattern Analysis has been developed to measure and correlate computational thinking skills relevant to game design and simulations. Results from a study with more than 10,000 students demonstrate rapid adoption of this curriculum by teachers from multiple disciplines, high student motivation, high levels of participation by women, and interest regardless of demographic background. . 2015. Scalable game design: A strategy to bring systemic computer science education to schools through game design and simulation creation. ACM Trans. Comput.

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Building a classroom environment based on student-led, meaningful collaboration is an ideal being promoted by educators and administrators seeking to equip students with 21st century workforce skills. More and more often, teachers are challenged to design lessons that utilize students' innate desire to communicate with one another rather than more traditional direct instruction. With a heavy focus on student-driven instruction and a reduced role for direct instruction, Carson Middle School's Game Design I course is able to utilize collaboration as a means for allowing students to not only learn but master and retain Computational Thinking Patterns and apply them in formal summative assessments. Through the collection of these data points throughout the course of a semester of learning, an educator can fully appreciate the learning of Computational Thinking skills that occurs as students build a sequence of games and simulations.

ABSTRACTconsidered simply, but a more complex evaluation of the effects of performing the tasks. For example, an educational activity that learners complete quickly and accurately is of no value if they learn nothing from it.We have adapted the programming walkthrough technique to help design computer-supported educational activities in elementary school science. We present examples from a case study which illustrate ways in which design of an educational activity is similar to and different from design of a user interface. We have found that the walkthrough approach is useful in this new setting, and that it sheds new light on the general task-centered orientation to design. Despite these differences in design problems, we hypothesized that the core logic of task-centered user interface design, and of the associated walkthrough methods, could be adapted to the design of educational activities. We present the results of our exploration of this possibility by describing a case study in which we adapted the programming walkthrough technique [2,9] to the design of a suite of educational activities about plants for an elementary school science unit.