Last week was Design Review Day for my code club. In one week’s time the students were able to come up with an original idea for a game, design it, plan its creation and pitch it. Amazing! This time I manned the lab while Alex, my high school volunteer and a parent volunteer conferenced with each group. Both volunteers were pleased with the pitches in general. I admit that I haven’t had a chance to review any of the completed game design documents myself.
Instead I’ve been busy working through a Scratch language MOOC on edX, from my alma mater, called: HarveyMuddX: CS002x Programming in Scratch. I’ve been excited about taking this online class since I first learned of it and started following the course professor Colleen Lewis on Twitter and at CSTeachingTips.org. The course has a nice balance of video lecture, directed “play” in Scratch and rigorous quizzes. The class has helped fill in gaps in my knowledge of Scratch. For one thing, I hadn’t played around much with the Sound blocks in Scratch, so that was a fun week.
I also learned about race conditions, which I hadn’t heard of before. A race condition is where two things are competing to set a variable or perform two operations at the same time and you cannot be sure of what the outcome will be. For example, below I’ve set the score to two different values when the green flag is clicked. Which will Scratch choose? -whichever setting wins the race.
An example of a race condition
I had fun making some little drawing projects
and a helicopter game.
Now I have to design a final project. And I have been directed to think about it first…
Rather than just diving into a project, we want you to start thinking about different ideas for things what you might do.
Hmm.. that’s like what I asked my students to do. The tables have turned and I’m not sure how they did it, now. I’ve been toying with a couple of different ideas for awhile now and I’m still not sure what I want to tackle. I’m going to have to make a decision soon and get to work.
This is my favorite question in the final project design phase of this MOOC:
Think about breaking your project into a series of simpler steps. What are the FIRST three things that you would make work?
I wish I had put some wording like that in my game design document for my students. At any rate, I will remember to ask my students how they will break up their tasks as they continue work on their projects tomorrow.
My Code Club Journal 