Mini-Course 2012: Another Successful Year

Last week marked the fifth year I've run my mini-course, Computer Science and Games: Just for Girls! This was a special year because of our study, and because it was my first taste of working full time away from the baby.  While both these factors made it challenging, I had some amazing helpers that made all the difference (thanks Elizabeth, Sarah, Laura, and Vanessa!).

I'll definitely be posting more about the results of our study once we have the opportunity to go through the data, but for now we do know from a discussion on the last day of the course that our always awesome group of girls generally liked our use of story.  One said she would have preferred to just learn the material directly, which I can certainly respect (and I appreciate her honesty).  Some said they felt like they remembered what they learned better when they could think about the story and the lesson within.  So for now, at the very least, using story is proven to be a good tool for engagement (no real surprise there).  We'll soon see if it helped the students perform better on our evaluation worksheets.

I'll be posting the students' games to my website soon as well, and I'll let you all know when they're up.  I have more than half of them to share (and maybe others will send theirs in later!).  As always, they have blown us away with what they can get done in a week's worth of afternoons.