Lesson 10: Mini-Project - Captioned Scenes

Prompt: Write down as many blocks as you can remember from Game Lab. Make sure you know what each one does, especially the inputs, or parameters, for each of the blocks.

Share: Allow students to share out what they remember as a group review.

The goal of this discussion is to review the different blocks and skills that students have learned. As students talk about the different blocks, try to steer the conversation into how they can be used creatively, to link into the main topic of the day.

You've already learned how to do some really great things in Game Lab. Today you'll have a chance to put them all together to make an interesting scene to share with the world. That means instead of trying to recreate someone else's idea, you're going to get to come up with an idea of your own, so it's time to get creative!

Question of the Day: How can we use Game Lab to express our creativity?

Facilitating Mini-Projects: Mini-Projects act as checkpoints in the curricula and cover the subset of skills students have seen so far in the unit. They are designed for 1-2 days of implementation as a way to check-in with how well students understand the course content so far. You may decide to extend these projects as a way to support or challenge students, which could allow you to revisit difficult concepts or support students who may have missed lessons and are trying to catch up. However, we recommend deciding this ahead of time and being firm with students about how much time they have for each project - otherwise, it's easy for projects to drag-out to multiple days and for student's work to spiral beyond the scope of this project.

Distribute: (Optional) pass out copies of the activity guide. Students can use this sheet to plan out the scene they create at the end of this lesson, but the planning can also be completed on scratch paper.

Transition Send students to Code Studio.

Facilitating Group Projects: If students are working in pairs or small teams to complete projects, consider showing these two videos to the class:

• How Teamwork Works
• Dealing with Disagreements

Depending on your goals with this project, consider having teams complete a Student Guide to Team Planning, which reinforces the message in the video

Debugging Strategies: As students design and implement their own project ideas, they may find themselves with new bugs that they need to untangle and you may find yourself looking at completely unfamiliar code as students look for help troubleshooting their errors. To help smooth out the debugging experience, consider the following strategies:

• Review the Teacher Guide to Debugging for some common questions and strategies to help support students in debugging their code
• Have students follow the steps in the Student Guide to Debugging and use the Bug Report Quarter-Sheets as an initial step in the debugging process. This helps students prepare and communicate their issue before asking for help.
• If students haven't seen it yet, consider showing the Debugging Video to the class to reinforce debugging best practices.

Digging Deeper: Consider supplying students with an object to talk to as part of the debugging process. This is sometimes known as Rubber Duck Debugging - you can learn more on the website https://rubberduckdebugging.com/

Allow students to walk around the room and see the pictures that each of their classmates has coded. Celebrate all of the different ideas that students were able to implement with the same basic code.

You may choose to formalize this process by having each student write down one positive quality of each project, or having students "draw names" to comment on one particular classmate's work.

Question of the Day: How can we use Game Lab to express our creativity?

Prompt: What was one especially creative way you saw someone else use the blocks today?

Share: Have students share out what they appreciated about their classmates' projects. You may want to do this "popcorn" style, with each student who responds choosing the next person to share.

This discussion should serve as a celebration of what the students have accomplished. As students share out what they have seen, encourage them to learn from each other and ask questions if they were not sure how to do something. Highlight how students were able to do very different things with the same tool.