Teaching tools

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Contents 1 Teaching Goal: Excited Students not finished Games 2 Synchronize Students 3 Use Projected Stopwatch to show much time there is left to finish depiction or program 4 Compile Error on Auroa Novell Networks

Teaching Goal: Excited Students not finished Games

Some teachers are concerned about time. Keep in mind that the goal of the initial module is about giving students a positive experience regarding computer science. Finishing a game, e.g., finishing Frogger, is not the main goal. If you can get your students to create a simple version of Frogger with, say, cursor key controlled frogs, moving trucks, and perhaps some truck generators then you are doing great. If you have more than a week students could move on to the more complex part of frogger such as the transportation (tutorial #2). Again, if you do not get to that point do not worry. If students want to they could download AgentSheets at home and continue. If the students have uploaded the games to the Scalable Game Design arcade then they can download their games and continue working at home.

Synchronize Students

We find it to be likely to result in trouble if you allow your students to go at different speeds. Especially at the beginning there will be an enormous difference between students. Later you may be able to have them work at their own pace for instance by using the wiki tutorial online or in printed out form. Here are some ideas on how to can keep students in synch:

• formulate clear goals:, e.g.," today we will draw four agents: Frog, road, grass and truck"
• use count down timers (more info below) to provide students a sense on how much time they have left
• allow for some touch up tasks. If you give students limited amount of time to make depiction, e.g., 5 minutes, then there is a good chance that some student would like to make their depictions looks better. Allow them to do these touch up tasks only if they have done everything else. For instance, if they are ahead with their programming tell them they can use the time for touching up the depictions.
• show them what they need to do using screen lock out: to get their attention show them what they need to have, and how to get there. Lock out their screens to get their full attention.
• Absolutely NO YOUTUBE: It is not OK to play around with other stuff such as YouTube, Facebook etc.
• Involve students into teaching: ask them how to achieve a certain goal. How do we make our frog look like this... How do we create a new rule... You may even have a student come up to drive the game building. Make sure you tell them that you and the rest of the class will talk them through. This not only makes the class more interesting but it allows you to walk around in the class room and help students. It is as if there is one more teacher in the class.

Use Projected Stopwatch to show much time there is left to finish depiction or program

A common problem is that students get carried away with drawing their depictions. We like students to be interested in the drawing part as it deals with parts of the ISTE standard but there is a high risk for your class to get out of synch. Teach your students to draft depictions quickly. For instance, make a blob looking frog in just about 5 minutes. The students can improve their creations later. You can find count down timers online. Project them allow everybody to see how much time there is left.

Compile Error on Auroa Novell Networks

The Aurora school district is using a Novell based network that introduces a problem with AgentSheets. When creating a new depiction or new agent you may see this kind of error message, e.g., "Compile Error: Unable to generate byte code for agent 'so and so' Unable to write class file for agent 'So and so' to ...so and so.class" As far as we can tell the Novell network interprets - sometimes - the compilation of resulting in the creation of .class files as unusual activity against which it will protect itself. We have not found a reliable way to reproduce this effect. It appears to happen randomly.

Work arounds

• when getting the error message above have the students save the work, exit AgentSheets and launch AgentSheets again. No work will be lost.
• we have had some students save their projects onto the computer desktop and then only at the end of the session copy the project into their networked account folders. This may not be very practical as students may forget to copy the project.