Icon and Hannah,

Thanks for sharing fun-based project that supports STEM learning. Use of mobile technologies must have enhanced participation. Thanks for sharing the links which are useful in assessing what could be contextualized in the Kenyan context

We are in the process of combining prior research and frameworks for computational thinking to apply to our own project! It has been an eye opening experience and has been great to learn from so many other frameworks and try to adapt them to fit our own unique project.

Hi Michael! Programs can respond to text input, button presses and button sequences that create a code. Students have the power to decide that the input takes the student to on the next screen. We have definitely run into limitations of the games that could be created, as students can be extremely creative and think of complex games. We have tried two different approaches to combat this. One is to adapt the un-programmable game to make it fit into our system with the teacher/researcher guidance and explaining how the system works through explaining another game. Another, is to explain the limitations of the system up front by showing the FSM diagram of a previously created game, before the students design a game, so that they stay within the limits of the system. I am wondering what your thoughts are on how to handle this?

Hi Chad! Our system features a debugger option for game creators, which puts them directly into the shoes of someone playing their game. It is a great way to understand the game as system. Children and teachers both have opportunities to show their creativity when creating games, currently they have all focused on math, but could extend to other subjects. We typically see recreations of popular games such as, scavenger hunts, capture the flag, hopscotch and relay races, but it is great to see the creativity of incorporating different math concepts into these games, especially as students create! When students create games, they typically create them for another student or class younger than them, where they would be a "math expert" in that topic. However, games are always checked by teachers or researchers before being programmed to check for correctness. We have also run a few studies assessing learning before and after playing games. Here is a journal article describing the process in more detail and with learning gains from three different teacher created games. https://citejournal.org/volume-20/issue-4-20/mathematics/developing-mathematics-knowledge-and-computational-thinking-through-game-play-and-design-a-professional-development-program/

Hi Zach! Thanks for your comment. Here is a journal article we have written on a professional development program we ran based on this project where we showed students made significant learning gains in math content after playing games. https://citejournal.org/volume-20/issue-4-20/mathematics/developing-mathematics-knowledge-and-computational-thinking-through-game-play-and-design-a-professional-development-program/ . We are still working on defining CT and coming up with a solid foundation and way to measure it, but recently ran a pilot study to collect data on our first version of a way to measure CT growth and are excited to look into that data. 

Hi Jeremy!

Thanks for seeing our video and your interest in the WLCP project!

We first know that students improve in their math problem solving ability from before to after they play these games. This was an AERA article this year we presented.

Regarding Computational Thinking, we have given students pre and posttests of 'finite state machines' problems in the past (one item about interpreting, one about modifying and one about creating a new one), and we know that (middle-high school students)  improved in that.

However, we are now currently working on the creation of contextualized CT assessments (based on a few different theories), to understand better how they might be making progress in specific CT skills such as data representations, simulations and modeling, computational problem solving, and systems thinking. It is not an easy task, as we can see that students are concretely using a large variety of CT skills, but it is hard to show how these skils might change over time, as they are fairly abstract.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I like Finite State Machines, as that's clearly content they wouldn't get otherwise.