Studio K

Studio K is a game design curriculum, online community, and set of teacher-support tools intended to enable teachers to help learners how to make their own video games using Microsoft Kodu. Kodu is a powerful 3D game design and programming tool that enables users to focus on creating compelling games for their friends.

The Studio K curriculum is designed to support the development of computational thinking skills and problem solving skills. Policymakers have identified computational thinking as a critical set of skills that students must be equipped with in order to be successful in STEM careers, as well as to fully participate in today's and tomorrow's creative society.

The core structure of Studio K is Play-Fix-Create. Within each mission, students begin by playing a level that highlights the specific learning goal of a lesson (e.g., Goals, Rules, etc.). Then they play a similar, but broken game, in which they must identify the broken part (which is related to the learning goal of the lesson), and fix the game. After this, the students can then create their own game using and building on the knowledge gained from each lesson.

We are currently developing a suite of teacher-support learning analytics tools that will make it easier for teachers (in schools or after school programs) to scale up the use of Studio K with their classes. These tools will empower teachers to easily track and support the development of powerful computational thinking and game design skills through automated visualizations of realtime data of students' use of Kodu.

If you are interested in using Studio K in your classroom or at an after-school club, contact the coordinators at: email: outreach@learninggamesnetwork.org, phone: 608-620-GLSC"

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