For the second year in a row, CU-Boulder’s Scalable Game Design (SGD) has a participating activity in Code.org’s Hour of Code and Computer Science Education Week, scheduled for Dec. 8-14, 2014.
With SGD’s AgentCubes Online, students get to code, play and share their own 3D Frogger-style game with children from around the world, all guided by the interactive instructional video. Students start programming in the first couple of minutes of the activity.
“Being included in Hour of Code is not easy. Out of the over 40 activities featured, a large number are Code.org or sponsor-developed games or activities,” project manager Yasko Endo said. “Hour of Code is also now international, so it’s really quite an honor to be included.”
Scalable Game Design, created by computer science research professor Alex Repenning, is focused on promoting computer science to girls and underrepresented students through programs that are embedded into existing regular classroom lesson plans, primarily in middle schools. The project has turned into the largest study of middle school computer science education in the U.S., with more than 10,000 subjects, nearly half of whom were girls.