Throughout our discussions with MeshEd, we developed the following two overall learning goals for the new game design/coding action lab.

• Students will learn foundational coding skills that they can apply contextually.

• Students will engage in social and emotional learning through collaboration and storytelling.

These learning goals reflect MeshEd's vision of providing students with an opportunity to get an introduction to coding and gain skills they can use in potential future career paths. They also incorporate MeshEd's goal of involving social and emotion skill building across all action labs.

After developing overall learning goals, our team then focused on defining learning objectives that students will need to meet to reach those overall goals. Each of these objectives has a measurable outcome that students will work toward engaging in by the end of the course.

These objectives were developed using Bloom's Revised Taxonomy and are listen sequentially, with those that require lower order cognition listed first and higher order cognition listed later.

• Students will demonstrate self-management by describing their goals for the action lab.

• Students will demonstrate self-awareness by completing self-assessments that detail actionable self feedback.

• Students will demonstrate relationship skills through productive group work and peer feedback.

• Students will identify elements of an activity that make it a game.

• Students will describe how fundamental coding principles are used in a game.

• Students will apply two fundamental coding principles in virtual games on a beginner-level platform.

• Students will build a vision board that illustrates the storyline and basic features of a game they would like to design.

• Students will connect the coding and game design skills they have developed with future career paths.

• Students will design a virtual game on a beginner-level platform that implements game design elements such as narrative, rewards, goals, etc., using the ideas they generated on their vision boards.

• Students will develop a basic virtual game based on their designs that incorporates two fundamental coding principles.

Through our meetings with MeshEd leadership, interview with the MeshEd learning designer Julia, our analysis of the MeshEd curriculum bundle, and observations of Shae's Art of the Podcast lab, we have developed an understanding of how students learn through the MeshEd curriculum.

A key point of understanding is that the action labs are based on a project-based learning model, where the end project/product is conceptualized before the rest of the unit is built out. It is an "action" lab in that students will be doing work on their end product throughout the ten sessions.

Students learn from a combination of game-based exercises, journal exercises in which they brainstorm and take notes, videos and conversations with guest experts, example projects, and vision board creation. For our action lab, we must include the vision boarding, journaling, and learning from guest experts. Technical skills are taught via "tech moment" videos.

Students must be able to learn in-person or virtually, since the class is conducted on Zoom. Students must be able to track their progress online on digital portfolios.

Students also meet CASEL, HQPBL, and SEL learning objectives through the course design. Collaboration and creativity are two skills that are stressed in relation to these frameworks.

From the student surveys, we can glean a bit of information about the student perspective. Largely, students expressed interest in taking the course because they want to develop a portfolio to apply to New York City high schools and colleges. Some students signed up without knowing what they were signing up for, and in this case, the parents had their own motivations for signing up their students.

In casual conversation with Art of the Podcast action lab students, Shae discovered that the project is also a motivating factor:

"This class [podcasting] was more fun than documentary film. Probably because I like podcasts more." - A

"If I could take a game design class, I'd make a new version of Pacman." - AJ

So, if we want to make a class that is motivating for students, we need to make the skills marketable to the parents, and make the project interesting for the students. When Shae expressed that we were thinking of building a game design course to her Art of the Podcast students, there was a widely positive response.

With the advice from our interview with Xavier Ochoa, Xavier discussed 4 principles for game designers. Those principles being teamwork and collaboration, project and time management, communication, and conflict resolution. We plan on incorporating all these principles into our curriculum design, but we are planning on putting an emphasis on teamwork and collaboration. Our goal is to showcase examples of successful collaboration and teamwork in the coding and game design professions. This emphasis on collaboration and teamwork in the coding and game design profession will encourage students to explore various teams and prepare them with the foundational skills needed to work in coding and game design.

We are also planning on incorporating expert spotlights and conversations, which will urge young students to further research the experts within the field. In the expert spotlight, we will ask the industry experts how they started out in their field and what sparked their interest in game design and coding. When students have this interaction with experts and hear their stories, it will serve as a motivation for students who want to further explore the field. We will also discuss with the experts how they develop and currently use foundational principles, teamwork and collaboration, project and time management, communication, and conflict resolution, and how these principles are used in their everyday work.

If you go into any middle school classroom and ask "Who likes Roblox?", every single kid will raise their hand (I did this in fall 2021 and can attest to its accuracy).

Simplistically speaking, the craze began with Minecraft, a sandbox-style game that emerged in the late 2000s. If you're not familiar, the basic premise is that everything is made out of cubes. You can "mine" these cubes for materials and then build things with those materials. When it became more readily available in 2012, it took the middle-school age range by storm (Microsoft eventually bought it a few years later). As a teacher during those years, I can attest to the level of madness Minecraft inspired among kids that age. I admit that I tried it myself, back in 2013, and was extremely bored. So what was it about Minecraft that made it so appealing?

The first and most obvious answer is that it is a video game. Kids love video games. Kids' parents tell them not to play video games. This makes them want to play video games more. That isn't too complicated. I was a kid myself once and my obsession with video games ran deep.

The more useful analysis comes with the allure of the sandbox game. A standard tenant of Young Adult fiction is to write about kids that are in a new world where anything is possible. In Minecraft, if you can imagine something in a blocky, colorful form, you can make it. It's like Legos with the important difference being that the Legos are infinite.

Another key is the social aspect: you can play Minecraft online with friends. When I was a kid, the only thing better than Legos was building Legos with friends. This is taken to a new extreme with Minecraft, where kids from all over can come together to build an unlimited blocky world.

Roblox built off of this frenzy (no pun intended). The main difference is that Roblox isn't limited to the mechanics of a Minecraft world. You can theoretically build any game you'd like with its assets and invite others to play in it. This has resulted in a library of Roblox sub-games that kids can play together online.

The next question is: how can we harness the power of the "social sandbox game" to make learning more equitable and interesting?

This question will be answered (hopefully) in the design phase, but based on this research we can assume that leveraging the worlds and mechanics of Roblox and/or Minecraft will be key.

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Video games have become an extremely important storytelling medium over the last few decades. In 1981 Nintendo released Donkey Kong, the first video game with a story, featuring an Italian plumber named Mario trying to rescue a princess from a giant gorilla. Donkey Kong and Mario have become mainstay cultural phenomenons despite this extremely weird origin story, but the principles behind it are important. Shigeru Miyamoto, the person behind the original Donkey Kong, says that he "wanted to make sure the whole story, simple though it was, could be told on screen in a way that could be instantly grasped by players." Creating video games is an extremely complicated process, as is learning to code, but Miyamoto brings up a point here that will help drive our project in the design phase: whatever form this ends up taking, we have to make sure that as many aspects as possible are "instantly grasped." This is one of the arguments for using Minecraft as an environment for coding: most kids already know how to play Minecraft, which would make teaching the more complicated bits much easier.

From making games, kids can learn both the basics of coding and find a way to express a creative vision. This is especially true nowadays, when stories for games are becoming more and more elaborate, transcending the linear medium we are used to in film. For example, a game like Mass Effect has players make decisions about what their character should do, leading to specific consequences down the line.

In this section, we go over various free platforms that can be used to help children understand coding, algorithms, and thinking like a computer. We also, obviously, want to make it fun.

There are many free programs, but there must be a balance between usability and cost. Unfortunately, there is no platform out there that is both of these things. There are free, open source programs like Blender, which are extremely safe and stable, but require a steep learning curve before anything can get made. On the other end is Game Building software, which is extremely easy to use, safe, and stable, but costly.

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There are two general learning goals for programming. One is to exercise the programming mind to solve some practical problems (e.g. algorithmic problems). The other is specific programming languages, which are diverse but vary greatly for different ways of use (front-end such as Html, CSS, and back-end such as Python, C#, C++, javascript).

Our target user group is middle school students interested in programming but are beginners. It is not easy for these users to learn complex programming languages at the beginning.

We want to use a step-by-step approach for the overall learning approach, breaking the whole learning process into smaller tasks and choosing the ones that suit the learners according to their interests and prior knowledge. At the same time, the content progresses from shallow to deep, and a modular programming language can be used at the beginning of the learning process and then given practical content after understanding its function and meaning.

We are also happy to use "cues" to help children develop a stimulus-response equation for learning. Writing code is easier by filling in the blanks, sorting, and other small topics. See Examples games.