Bell - CT and Playing and Making Games

Making games definitely seems like an obvious output from constructionism (i.e. Kafai & Burke, 2015). And making games through programming would definitely support computational thinking and many of its concepts from programming. But some game-making environments don’t use programming. Gamestar Mechanic is something I’ve used with elementary school students to make games. It just involves dragging avatars, enemies, and blocks around to make a Mario-like game. Characters and blocks have different features, like speed, weapons, damage, etc. But it doesn’t actually involve any programming. I would say the main computational thinking practice that something like Gamestar Mechanic supports would be debugging. If there are too many enemies and blocks, there’s no way to win the game, so creators must remove some enemies or use a different avatar with more weapons, an example of finding and fixing errors to work towards the creator’s game design goals. And clearly debugging would be a part of environments that support making games through programming. The extent to which students actually think carefully and systematically about their debugging practices is another issue that probably requires some scaffolding (as our math group found last week with our student). But debugging in general definitely seems to be an aspect of CT that could be supported by different types of game-making environments. 

The Pandemic board game example shows how playing board games, especially collaborative ones that support players discussions solutions out-loud, supports elements of CT (Berland & Lee, 2011). Besides debugging, conditional logic is one that players use a lot to plan for what might come next in the game. “If we do this then that will happen,” or thinking of the reverse, “if we want that to happen then we have to do this.” The authors give an example of a player predicting a Ho Chi Minh card might be next and explaining what would happen if that card is picked. There’s another example on line 12 on page 74 where Patrick says, “if you can give me the two blacks, we can build a research station in black, we could cure black.” Basically, he’s saying if one player does this then the group can cure the black disease. He’s using conditional logic to predict and suggest a strategy in the game. 

From reading the papers for this week, it seems like more research on collaborative games, both board games and digital games (and in the context of playing and making games) is an interesting place open for further research.

I love this quote from Kafai (2016) on page 27: “students need a more expansive menu of computing activities, tools, and materials. Designing authentic applications is an important step in the right direction, but games, stories, and robotics are not the only applications for achieving this goal. We need different materials to expand students’ perspectives and perceptions of computing.”

This kind of points to how I’m thinking about computational thinking as expanding beyond programming. Tools like Scratch are just one way of reaching the goal of teaching CT. But there are lots of different materials and activities we can use to broaden participation in CT; for example, playing games (not just programming games but also playing them) and knitting.