I love this idea!  I used to do an afterschool Zoombini contest at my former school. Do you need more classes to test this? I asked my third grade teachers if they were up for this and they were so excited!.  I am a tech integration specialist/STEAM lab at a K-6 school ~300 kids.  

We would love to learn more about your project and get involved!

Maureen Tumenas

Hi Maureen. Love the Zoombinis enthusiasm! We are currently wrapping up the implementation phase of our study but send me and email and we can investigate possibilities. barb_maceachern@terc.edu

Thanks for your question, Daniel! Currently, we are partnering with teachers within a wide variety of classroom settings. We have math specialist, tech integration specialists, elementary generalists who connect Zoombinis to both math and science, middle school technology specialists, middle school engineering and robotics, just to name a few. There is a base line common ground across all of our partner teachers, they integrate computational thinking into their classes or they teach computational thinking units (mostly coding). We're focusing on 4 pattern recognition, problem decomposition, algorithm design and abstraction. So, in theory, we the teachers are in a place where they can make the connections and help build a bridge or use the bridging that we provide for several of the Zoombinis puzzles. 

We're still in the implementation phase of the study and will have much more information around how classroom context influences how teachers are able to bridge game play with their curriculum. Stay tuned...

Thanks Carrie. Many teachers are using Scratch but don't have a CT foundation underneath the coding activity so we are excited to see how to build this bridge.

Thanks, Jan! For right now, the classroom activities are only available to our research study teachers. We hope to share them with a wider audience after the study is over, but details of exactly how they will be shared are still undetermined at this point.

Thanks, Jessica! We've developed a single set of classroom activities, which we think will (for the most part) work across the grade levels, at least as a starting point. We tried to offer a wide variety of activity types (online, up-and-moving, etc.) and align activities to standards so that teachers can choose what they find most appropriate for their students' grade and skill levels. We also encourage teachers to adapt the activities as they see fit and to share their modifications with us in their classroom logs as well as with other teachers in our study through our Google+ community. Feedback from our teachers on the materials so far has been positive for students across the entire grade/age span.   

And following up on Erin's response, in a separate CSforALL project called CodePlay, we are building a Playlist generator that will create sequences (playlists) of CT activities that are differentiated by subject area, grade level, activity type (e.g. offline, kinesthetic), and eventually by students' individual demonstrated implicit CT knowledge in environments like Zoombinis.

Hi Mari,

Great questions! We don't have a formal professional development component of this project, but we have several mechanisms in place for supporting our research study teachers as they implement the Zoombinis game and bridge activities. The bridge activities are organized by Zoombinis puzzle and are tagged with relevant content standards (NGSS, Common Core Math, and CSTA's K-12 Interim CS Standards), the CT skills highlighted in the activity, and the type of activity (online, hands-on, up-and-moving, etc.). Each teacher has an EdGE team member "buddy" to help them plan out which activities to use and to answer questions about content and technical issues throughout their participation. We also have a Google+ community for our teachers to share ideas and materials as well as monthly video calls with teachers and EdGE team members to discuss how things are going in the classroom and what successes and challenges they have encountered using the game and classroom activities. For the study, we have asked that teachers devote a minimum of 10 classroom hours teaching, discussing, and/or doing activities that support computational thinking, including Zoombinis gameplay and bridge activities. The teachers keep logs to document what they do in class and how much time they spend on different types of activities so that our researchers can determine how different implementation strategies impact development of students' CT skills.  

Hi Rebecca! We are using the students' own gameplay, the patterns of behaviors they exhibit as they solve the puzzles, as implicit assessments of their CT. We then watch how that changes over time. We compare those results to pre/post online assessments we've developed and validated with Val Shute and her colleagues at Empirical Games. We are using information about the extent of game play and the extent of Zoombinis related bridging activities in class as variables to see how they impact students' learning - so we can hopefully tease out how much those variables impact their learning. I hope that clears it up for you :)

Hey Jim! yes we are doing a lot of work with teachers about how they connect CT in games with classroom activity. Let's definitely talk more about the DRK12. Email me at jodi_asbell-clarke@terc.edu and we can set up a time. 

Hi Joseph - while not exactly like ECgD, because we are more emergent, we end up with a similar result. We start by observing and recording the gameplay of about 70+ players at all different levels to get a good sampling of strategies used to solve the puzzles. We then distill the data logs to provide features that can be mined to automate the detection of these strategies....so it is not exactly bottom-up either. We build detectors based on the groundtruth of extensive observation and human-labelling. The labelling does take a lot of time, but then it can be replicated and scaled to much greater numbers....I hope that answers your question!

Hi Trevor,

Yes, the implicate learning that takes place during game place can be made explicate at any grade level! We created 3 HS science apps a few years back for a research study we called Leveling Up and witnessed many teens making connections to science concepts as they played the game. I'm linking our research page from our website in case you'd like to read more. 

Thanks for the positive Zoombinis words! 

Barb