Teaching Options
Scalable Game Design project meets students at their current skills, experience, and interest level. For some this may mean the student has had no previous exposure to SGD. Others may have spent 3 of their middle school years working with SGD. SGD project also meets teachers at their current classroom situations - some teachers have 2 or more weeks to devote to implementing various games and simulations. Others may only have 4 to 5 class periods to spare. Teachers have a variety of experience with computers, computer science, and game and simulation design. And depending on the subject taught by a teacher, the curriculum can be easily adapted to provide relevant and helpful content in a timely manner.
SGD project is flexible, diverse, SCALABLE to match the needs of the students and the teachers.
The following are options and suggestions on how you might implement Scalable Game Design in your classroom.
Teachers new to SGD project are encouraged to use Frogger as the first of their two required implementation cycles.
If you have other implementation pathways to suggest, please send them to the project.
In Technology / Computer Education classes:
Technology teachers are asked to implement:
- two or more games and/simulations during the school year
- Frogger implementation: new tech teachers are required to teach Frogger as one of the two or more implementations
- Advanced games and simulation implementation: Below are suggested combination of games to simulations with each step becoming increasingly complex.
- Frogger - Journey and/or Pac-Man (and if time ... Sokoban – Space Invaders)
- (Fast track for Advanced Pacing) Frogger – Pacman – Simulations
- (Super fast track for the Extremely Advanced Pacing) Frogger – Space Invaders – Simulations
- Games to computational science applications implementations: A series of design activities starting with a game with computational thinking patterns that can transfer to computational science – e.g. start with the sims or pacman (collaborative diffusion) then transitioning to computational science applications related to collaborative diffusion: virus spreading, ants foraging, etc.
- Computational Science applications implementations: A series of design activities building computational science models based on some real world phenomena: e.g. ecosystems, insect, animal or human behavior, probabilities, population growth – linear vs. exponential, etc.
In Content (Science, Math, Engineering, or Arts) classes
Math, Science, Engineering, and Arts content teachers often introduce a short 1 to 2 day implementation followed by at least one longer 3 to 4 day implementation:
- Short implementation (pre-TCAP/other testing) 1-2 days
- For science, use existing simulations (e.g. Virus/Contagion, Ants Foraging, Ecosystem, Mud Slide, Heat diffusion, Forest Fires) and mod simple aspects (e.g. virus spreading parameters); use plotting and analyze data.
- For math, highlight and explore the mathematics in one of the above units (such as the diffusion equation, hill climbing algorithm) or explore exponential vs. linear growth (Rumors simulation), probabilities & fairness (simulating wind in Forest Fire simulation; Rock/Paper/Scissors simulation), ratios (Fish 1 simulation), or statistical sampling (Fish 2 simulation)
- Long implementation (post-TCAP/other testing) 3-4 days: Use existing simulations and add new components (agents) to it or change it in substantial ways that require coding.
- For example for Virus: introduce doctors, immunity, etc. For Ecosystems, add new species.
- Use data analysis tools, such as Excel (when you export the simulation data) for integration with math content such as graphing linear and non-linear relationships, line of best fit, statistical predictions based on a simulation, etc.
