Computational Thinking Tools – Creating Games to Learn

Alexander Repenning ist Professor für Informatik an der University of Colorado. Dort beschäftigt er sich unter anderem mit der Entwicklung von Autorenwerkzeugen, die das relativ einfache Erstellen von interaktiven Simulationen ermöglichen. Er wird uns diese „Computational Thinking Tools“ präsentieren und illustrieren, wie sie effizient und sinnvoll im Unterricht angewendet werden können.

Computational Thinking Tools:

Game design appears to be a promising approach to excite public school students in Computer Science. Unfortunately, balancing motivational and educational concerns is truly challenging. Over a number of years, we have explored how to achieve a functional balance by creating a curriculum that combines increasingly complex game designs, computational thinking patterns and computational thinking tools. Scalable Game Design is a research project exploring new strategies of how to scale up from after school and summer programs into required curriculum of public schools through game design approaches. The presentation reports our experiences with thousands of students from sites including inner city schools, remote rural areas and Native American communities and explores if computational thinking skills acquired in the context of game design will transfer to more practical applications such as science simulation building activities.

Alexander Repenning is a computer science professor at the University of Colorado, a member of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design at the University of Colorado and the founder of AgentSheets Inc. Repenning’s research interests include education, end-user programmable agents, and artificial intelligence. He has worked in research and development at Asea Brown Boveri, Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, and Hewlett Packard. Repenning is the creator of the AgentSheets simulation and game-authoring tool. He has offered game design workshops nationally at Stanford, the MIT Media Lab, and University of Colorado as well as internationally in Europe and Japan. His work has received numerous awards including the Gold Medal from the mayor of Paris for “most innovative application in education of the World Wide Web”, and “best of the best innovators” by ACM. Repenning has been a Telluride Tech Festival honoree for contributions to computer science. Repenning is an advisor to the National Academy of Sciences, the European Commission, the National Science Foundation, The Japanese Ministry of Education and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).