We approach STEM education and access to high quality, relevant learning opportunities as a social justice issue of our time, this includes taking an anti-deficit ideological stance on students and their achievement. We start with student identified relevant themes, questions, challenges, and goals and see who students are and what they bring to the table as assets, important and rich resources to draw on. We utilize aspects of the nationally recognized Exploring Computer Science (ECS) curriculum to spark student excitement about computing and focus on bringing the culture into the fabric of computing practice. We utilize a custom-made digital platform called MazeStar that allows students to explore their ideas while learning about human-computer interaction, web design, privacy, coding, debugging, and more. A component of MazeStar is a game-like programming environment called Mazzy in which students learn the building blocks of coding.
In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG2015), Pacific Grove, CA, USA. Jun-22 - Jun-25, 2015. 5 pp.
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE2014), Raleigh, North Carolina, Sep 30 - Oct 5. 7 pp.
We present an approach for automated evaluation and generation of videogames made with PuzzleScript, a description-based scripting language for authoring games, which was created by game designer Stephen Lavelle. We have developed a system that automatically discovers solutions for a multitude of videogames that each possess different game mechanics, rules, level designs, and win conditions. This was achieved by developing a set of general ruleset heuristics to assess the playability of a game based on its game mechanics. From the results of our approach, we showcase that a description-based language enables the development of general methods for automatically evaluating games authored with it. Additionally, we illustrate how an evolutionary approach can be used together with these methods to to automatically design alternate or novel game mechanics for authored games.
In this work, we investigate how people exhibit and construct forms of self-expression in virtual environments including computational systems such as online social networks, or videogames. For example, in everyday life people dress in certain ways to reflect their individual senses of fashion, thereby expressing their social and personal knowledge regarding clothing. However, looking at a large number of people, distinctive categories may become apparent such as “formal,” “business casual,” or “leisurewear.” Such identity-related phenomena take place in computational systems as well. In representing oneself in computational systems, certain aspects of one's identity, including preferences and knowledge, are imparted. By comparing and contrasting these representations between the different computational systems, we may begin to understand how these systems support, or hinder, the user in terms of representing themselves adequately. More importantly, we may begin to identify, and model, phenomena that exists within the real world computationally too, enabling us as developers and designers to understand the consequences and implications of choices made in the development and design of such systems.
