The Entrepreneurial Game Studio, part of Drexel's ExCITe Center, piloted a professional development program middle school STEM educators to help them integrate the Python computer programming language and computational thinking skills into their existing curricula. At the conclusion of the project, the students played the games they designed/programmed on the 29-story Cira Centre in downtown Philadelphia.
Meet the middle-schoolers who participated in the Skyscraper Games project.
See the culmination of the Skyscraper Games project, as the community gathers to play the games these middle schoolers designed and programmed.
Duvall, M., Lee, F., and Smith, B. K. (2019). Skyscraper Games: Professional development for using custom technology tools. Paper presented at the AERA 2019 National Conference, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Duvall, M., Lee, F., and Smith, B. K. (2018). Skyscraper Games: Designing professional development for middle school teachers to promote computational thinking using custom tools. In Kay, J. and Luckin, R. (Eds.). Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age: Making the Learning Sciences Count, 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2018, Volume 2. London, UK: International Society of the Learning Sciences.
Duvall, M., Lee, F. & Smith, B. (2018). Professional development for middle school teachers to promote computational thinking for populations underrepresented in STEM fields. In E. Langran & J. Borup (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 1427-1434). Washington, D.C., United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).