Challenge

Can you adapt an existing game to make it a focused teaching experience?

Problem

Topic

Teaching children about the habitats, behaviors and characteristics of animals.

Audience

Reading-age elementary school children.

Setting

Elementary school classrooms, particularly during free periods or group work.

Problem

How can a card game in the style of Apples to Apples be used to help children identify the different attributes associated with a variety of animals?

Welcome to the Alien Pet Shop! ATP is a game that teachers designers and other professionals the basics of interactive programming. The player is the chief mechanic at a shop that sells very unusual pets. The game guides the player along to handling increasingly complex orders and customizing the wackiest animals for sale in the galaxy!

Alien Pet Shop is a game that allows players to assume the role of a mechanic. This is the machine that the mechanic must build and extend. Orders of different kinds come in here, then are processed by a program that the player writes themselves.

In Alien Pet Shop, players have to alter the guts of the ordering machine to accommodate customer requests. This is a simple example of what the interface would look like. By using simple tools, the player learns the basics of programming.

This is the proposed code editor for the Alien Pet Shop project. It features a graphical as well as textual interface for writing code. Using multiple syntaxes will hopefully lead to an increase in understanding.

• Design Cycle
• Can prototype, but it's not necessary
• except for the last one
• This is not always exactly linear
• but the presentations are due in line

The Arduino coding session we had today seemed to go pretty well (though I'll let the other folks blog about what it was like on the student end of things.) We got a bunch of things blinking and buzzing, and we covered most of what you need to do to read and write digitally and analog... analogally... analogly... analogalogally... hmm, don't know the word for that. At any rate, it was fun for me.

• shiftOut
• turns numbers into streams of data
• handy for working with other chips
• especially simple ones that don't take serial