Posts tagged girls
CU: Build your own 3-D video game
Dec 5th
you build a video game, learn to code
In just one hour, school kids, teachers and any code-curious member of the public with an Internet connection can now create their own 3-D video game using a tutorial built by a team at the University of Colorado Boulder in preparation for the global “Hour of Code” event happening the second week of December.
CU-Boulder’s game-building program allows people with zero experience coding to design their own 3-D worlds by “inflating” hand-drawn 2-D icons and then programming those objects to interact in defined ways. For example, a participant could easily create a 3-D version of the classic arcade game Frogger by inflating a frog and then writing a line of code that would tell the program to squash the frog if it collides with a truck that has also been programmed to move horizontally across the screen at a set speed.
CU-Boulder’s online game-building tool is among a variety of self-guided tutorials that have been created for the Hour of Code, an event that aims to recruit 10 million schoolchildren to spend one hour during the week of Dec. 9-15, dubbed Computer Science Education Week, learning the basics of coding. The event, spearheaded by the nonprofit code.org, is designed to spark excitement about coding among youth in order to bolster a future interest in computer science, a field that’s increasingly important to a wide range of careers as well as everyday life.
“Programming should be easy and exciting,” said CU-Boulder computer science Professor Alexander Repenning, who led the project. “But that’s not where we are. The perception of the public is that it’s hard and boring. Our goal is to expose a much larger as well as broader audience to programming by reinventing computer science education in public schools.”
CU-Boulder’s Hour of Code tutorial—which can be found at http://hourofcode.com/ac—builds on two decades of Repenning’s research, which has pioneered drag-and-drop programming tools for kids called AgentSheets and AgentCubes. Repenning and his team also have developed Scalable Game Design, a curriculum teachers can implement to help their students use AgentSheets and AgentCubes to learn computer science through building their own video games.
Students can use the same tools and their new computational thinking skills to build science simulations—the coding needed to lay out what should happen when a truck collides with a frog is not that different from the coding needed to outline the chemical reaction that occurs when two molecules collide, for example.
The Scalable Game Design project recently received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue to expand nationally.
From the beginning, the purpose of Scalable Game Design was to give school kids a taste of coding that might be able to flip the often-held belief that computer programming was not something they wanted to learn.
Repenning and his team began to reach out to kids in the local Boulder Valley School District, offering video game-building workshops as an after-school activity. The participants loved it, but the kids who initially showed up were the usual suspects—boys. In subsequent years, the project was introduced into classes that were already being taught during the school day, exposing all kinds of kids who might not normally be inclined to try computer programming, especially girls and minority students, to code.
“We asked them after, ‘Did you enjoy the activity?’ And they said, ‘Yeah. We love it and we want to do more of it,’ ” Repenning said.
The program is now ubiquitous in Boulder-area middle schools, and beginning about five years ago, Repenning received a $1.5 million grant from NSF to expand the program to schools outside the local district, especially districts with widely varying demographics, from inner-city schools to extremely rural schools and Native American communities. To implement the expansion, CU-Boulder hosted trainings on campus each summer to prepare teachers to deliver the program.
During the first expansion, Repenning and his colleagues also discovered that the way the video-game curriculum was taught impacted the degree to which girls, who are vastly underrepresented in computer science, were interested in coding. Direct instruction appeared to turn girls off, while inquiry-based approaches got the girls as excited as the boys.
Repenning has since received two more NSF grants. The first, for $1.5 million, is being used to follow up on how pedagogy affects girls studying computer science. The second and most recent grant—$2 million awarded in August—recognizes the achievements of the initial expansion effort and is being used to further spread Scalable Game Design across the country.
After the initial expansion, the Scalable Game Design team measured the success of the program by gauging the interest students had in learning more about computer science after they finished designing a video game and by analyzing the games themselves to see if the design of the games demonstrated a grasp of coding concepts. With positive results in both categories, NSF gave the team a green light to further expand the program by offering some teacher-training programs online.
The Hour of Code tutorial built on the Scalable Game Design infrastructure now allows anyone who is interested to get a taste of video game programming. More information on the Hour of Code can be found at http://csedweek.org/. Anyone interested in participating in the Hour of Code or using CU-Boulder’s Hour of Code program in their classes can find information athttp://hourofcode.com/ac.
-CU-
CU netster Aiello wins 10 singles matches
Nov 9th
Aiello won her 10th singles match of the fall, a team high, defeating Katie Brozovich of Bowling Green, 6-0, 6-4. It was also Aiello’s seventh straight win. Manzi Tenorio bounced back with a pair of wins over the last two days at the WMU Invite after starting on the short-end during the month of September, where she dropped a few matches. The senior from Cali, Colombia, also defeated a Bowling Green opponent, Brittany Plaszewski in three sets, 6-4, 3-6, 1-0 (3). The singles field consists of 10 round robin draws of four players each, with each player playing a round of singles on each day.
The doubles field, however, will consist of a bracketed draw of 16, with two rounds of doubles over the last two days. All matches will be played at West Hills Athletic Club, a 10-court indoor facility operated by the University. The scoring at the WMU Super Challenge will be done using an experimental format. Singles matches will be played with tiebreakers at 5-5 and a third-set super tiebreaker if necessary, and doubles matches will be played to six games, also with a tiebreaker at 5-5. CU also won a doubles match on the day as junior Julyette Steur and freshman Nuria Ormeño Ruiz defeated Western Michigan’s team of Ashby/Sujashvili, 6-4. The final day of the WMU Invite will conclude Sunday with singles play.
[includeme src=”http://c1n.tv/boulder/media/bouldersponsors.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”670″ height=”300″]
Kyleesha Weston Leaves Basketball Team, Intends to Transfer
Jul 31st
BOULDER — Sophomore guard Kyleesha Weston will not return to the University of Colorado women’s basketball team for personal reasons, head coach Linda Lappe announced on Tuesday.
She has returned to her native Kansas City, Mo., with the hopes of transferring to a school closer to home.
“I wanted to be closer to my family; I felt like I would be happier here (in Kansas City),” Weston said. “I talked (at length) with my family and some of my teammates. This didn’t happen overnight. I had been thinking about it for a while when I made the decision.
“I still care about each one of my teammates and each one of the coaches and hope to keep a great relationship with them. I wish them the best of luck this year and for years to come.”
Weston played in 30 of 32 games as a true freshman in 2012-13, averaging 1.8 points and 1.4 rebounds while dishing out 20 assists and logging 15 steals.
She served as a back-up to All-Pac-12 point guard Chucky Jeffery and had some good moments down the stretch of Colorado’s run to the 2013 NCAA Tournament, playing double-digit minutes in six of the final seven games.
Weston averaged five rebounds during the Pac-12 Tournament; grabbing a personal-best six in the quarterfinal win over Washington. She tallied a career-high eight points three times, including league wins over Arizona (home) and Utah (road).
“We enjoyed having ‘Ky’ at CU, but in the end the distance from home was a big factor in her decision,” Lappe said. “We wish her the best of luck in the future.”
A 2012 graduate of Park Hill High School, she was a finalist for the DiRenna Award as a senior, given to the top boys and girls high school basketball players in the Kansas City metro area. She averaged 18 points and nearly five assists per game, earning All-Suburban Big 6 Conference and Kansas City Star All-Metro honors.
Colorado is in the midst of preparing for a summer trip to Italy, Aug. 12-21, where the Buffaloes are scheduled to play four games against Italian opponents. Colorado finished the 2012-13 season at 25-7, fourth in the Pac-12 at 13-5, advancing to the NCAA Tournament for the 13th time in program history and first since 2004.
Troy Andre
Assistant SID/Internet Managing Editor
University of Colorado
[includeme src=”http://c1n.tv/boulder/media/bouldersponsors.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”670″ height=”300″]