Lesson 16: End of Course Project

Get students excited and ready for today's activity!

We have already had a chance to build a project in Play Lab. Today, this experience will be much more open-ended, so it will require planning beforehand! Planning is a very important part of coding a game or any other kind of software. So, before we jump onto the computers, we will spend some time planning the projects we want to build.

Distribute: Distribute one *Project Planning Guide to each student or pair. With students, go over the steps listed on the guide, then allow them to complete it. Refer to the included exemplar if needed.

If students are pair programming for this assignment, this warm up is a great opportunity for them to practice sharing and respecting others' ideas. Ensure students are following group work norms you already have in place in your classroom. Otherwise, spend a brief moment going over your expectations.

Equipped with their completed planning guides, students are now ready to bring their projects to life. These levels correspond to the structure of the planning guide, and help navigate students through the process of transforming their ideas into code.

Students will experience plenty of trial and error while coding. Their projects are likely to become truncated versions of their original scope. Remind students that this kind of compromise is common in software design. It's okay if they don't get to build in every feature they planned!

To celebrate students' work, spend the last 10 minutes or so allowing them to showcase their projects. This can be done in many ways, but here are a few:

• Public Demo: Select a few exemplary volunteers to briefly demo their projects in front of the class. As they do so, have them touch on what the planning-to-coding experience was like for them, including ideas they'd still like to implement.
• Pair Playtesting: Have students or groups pair up and playtest each other's projects. As they do, ask them to provide positive and constructive feedback to each other. The benefit here is that students will have the opportunity to provide and respond to feedback in a smaller setting.
• Gallery Walk: Ensure all students have their projects ready for testing. Have students move "musical chairs"-style to another computer and playtest the project there for a few minutes, until they receive a signal from you to move to another computer. Repeat this every few minutes. While there is less opportunity for structured communication here, this ensures students get to demo as many of their peers' projects as possible.