Little Miss Geek

This summer I taught Video Game Design and Crazy for Coding classes to fourth and fifth graders. As I was helping some of my Coding students create in Scratch I had the crazy idea of creating a Google Teacher Academy video game. I spent some time playing with the idea. I found some images online (that were Creative Commons licensed of course) and started to piece them together in Scratch. I hated it and decided to scratch the idea of creating a GTA game all together.  A little known fact about me ... I LOVE Google Draw! I use it on pretty much a daily basis for a wide variety of things. To me the possibilities are nearly endless. Right before leaving for Atlanta in ISTE I even used Google Draw to create my business cards. Later in the summer I was at the CPS Googlepalooza sitting in a Google Draw session led by the very awesome Jennie Magiera, and like a ton of bricks it hit me ... why was I looking for images online when I could create my own!  I started with making t...

This was the first week of summer school ... and oh what a week it was! I am teaching two different classes Game Design and Crazy for Code to incoming fourth and fifth graders. For Game Design the students are using Gamestar Mechanic . They learn different elements of video game design while working through challenges that teach them about the different elements of building a video game and then they work up to building their own game. Gamestar Mechanic does all of the coding for the students so that they are just manipulating the elements of a game: space, rules, components, mechanics, and goals. It helps them to develop a story for their game and I think it would be really interesting during the school year to let them create games around literature they are reading, history they are learning, or stories they are writing. The students are loving it! The class that I was most excited to teach was Crazy for Code. Don't get me wrong Game Design is a lot of fun, but I am reall...