Game programming in introductory courses with direct state manipulation
ITiCSE '05 Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Construction kits and design environments: steps toward human problem-domain communication
Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
The view of scientific inquiry conveyed by simulation-based virtual laboratories
Computers & Education
Computational thinking for youth in practice
ACM Inroads
Recognizing computational thinking patterns
Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
Creating science simulations through computational thinking patterns
Creating science simulations through computational thinking patterns
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Future school science standards, such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), emphasize the integration of simulation and modeling activities in the classroom environment. The extremes of these activities have two vastly different implementations. On one hand, a teacher can have students experiment on a pre-made simulation associated with the material. On the other hand, students can use, for example, an end-user programming tool to create the simulation from scratch. This allows students to not only experiment on, but also, to model the real world phenomenon being studied- a key component of computational thinking. However, the greater amount of time necessary for student authoring of simulations can make such an approach infeasible in the classroom environment. This paper presents a spectrum of strategies for integrating simulations into class- rooms emphasizing our research at the Scalable Game Design Lab, University of Colorado Boulder as well as research from other entities. Starting at consuming simulations and adding more user interaction and authoring elements begins to provide a gentle slope from consumption towards simulation creation. Results indicate that many of these strategies are quite effective.