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When you reach the end of an goal and look back at the journey, the route you took and the place where you stand now are rarely identical to those that you imagined when you began. This has been true concerning my professional goals upon starting the Master of Arts in Educational Technology degree at Michigan State University and at the present time, now that I am nearing its completion.
"Finish Line" by Pete Saloutos is licensed under an Adobe Stock Standard License.
My personal goals for acquiring my master’s degree have not changed. They remain being able to better provide for my family financially since my school gives a salary boost to those teachers with their master’s degree. This has been especially important in the past year because my wife has not been able to work because of her chronic pain.
Initially, my professional goals were to become a technological and pedagogical resource not only to the teachers in my school (Valley Lutheran High School in Saginaw, MI) but also to the teachers at our area grade schools. When I began, I imagined that I would share regular tech tidbits with my colleagues and they would seek me out in order to show them the latest and greatest to help them become more effective and efficient users of technology. Over the course of the program, I have shared insights that I have gained and little tricks I picked up, but my focus is now on developing the computer science department at our school into one of the strengths of our curricular offerings.
I believe that game development can be a key to this transformation. Increasing student engagement has been the focus of multitudes of studies over the years and achieving it has seemingly been the Holy Grail of educational designers for decades. Games are inherently engaging. Many students (and adults) willingly spend their money to purchase the games themselves or upgrades to the games and willingly invest dozens of hours in becoming more proficient in playing them.
"VL Computer Science" by Kevin Streeter is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.
I have seen the successful results of implementing a game development curricular focus in my own classes both at the introductory level and at the more advanced levels which are focused on computer science as a discipline. Students learn and apply key computational thinking concepts such as abstraction, algorithmic thinking, and pattern recognition as they analyze the games. Students gain skills in problem-solving as they decompose a game into its constituent parts. Students gain skills in organization and project management as they imagine and create their own games.
I look forward to the future and seeing where this program will be in ten years. I am thankful for the opportunities I have had to grow in my computational thinking skills and I hope to continue to share this growth with my students.
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