 Thank you and good afternoon, it's a pleasure to be here and as said we are both from the school of education, we're working with the computer science department on the scalable game design project which is funded by the National Science Foundation and also supported by a local software company, Agent Sheets Inc. So our goal is to really push back against the leaky pipeline so to speak, it's to provide opportunities for students to engage in computer programming early in elementary and middle school and one of the ways to do this for a topic that is typically seen as hard and boring is to create opportunities within the school day to at least build one simulation or game that can be done in a matter of five days or five hours. It started from four regions within Colorado and has expanded out now, it's one of the largest computer science education projects funded by the National Science Foundation spanning 15,000 students and probably close to 500 teachers now. So we want to give you a quick idea of what does this look like in the classroom. We start our kids by programming Frogger, it's an easy way for them to understand computational thinking patterns and it leads us to the world's largest group of Frogger games. If you don't know Frogger, I didn't go into this project, it's a pretty simple game, I didn't. The frog has to go across the road, he can't get hit by cars, he then has to go across the river, he'll drown if he's in water, he's not a real frog and he has to get to the flag at the end. So what does this look like when our kids design it? We start by creating our characters, we refer to them as agents, we bring in language arts skill, we tell the kids the language, the agents are all of your nouns in the game. If you can find the nouns, you can find your agents. So they actually create their agents themselves. You're seeing 2D representations there, we also have a 3D software version. So the kids are able to design agents that are specific to them. So they can make Frogger, they can make Hogger, they can make Dogger, they can make it so that is specific to them. We then go on and say, okay, if you can find the verbs in your game, the action verbs, not the being verbs, you can find all of the actions for your agents. And so they can select what actions do they need to program for each of their agents. When they're doing that, they have a setup that looks like this that provides them with conditions, if statements, and actions, which become the then statements. And they can group multiple if statements, multiple then statements to really have a robust program and a robust design. The software that we use really supports our students, so it has the ability to actually explain the code in words so that students understand what they're doing. And it also color codes the code, the color codes, all of the programming rules so that the students know what's going to fire first and what won't fire. So one of the questions we've been asked is, well, if you can build a Frogger game, can you build a simulation? And in fact, because of the probabilities involved in game design and the mathematics use of variables, in fact, it's very interesting transition to make. So this is actually a simulation designed by one student. And knowing this is you, car, and atmosphere and such, this is about the closest we could get to it. But you can actually add to it. All the leaves of ground lead to the grave and the sky. And really, the whole idea here is to have students model natural phenomenon using variables and coding schemes. So we also have embedded in our arcade when students upload their games and simulations, it assesses by machine the different computational thinking patterns that students use. And we have another assessment as well. Right, as we go through, we want not only to create games. The jobs aren't out there to create games. We want the kids to be able to look at this and say, could you build this assessment or build this simulation? Could you look at this Eagle? What agents would you need? What computational thinking patterns would you want? How does this look in your simulation? And how would you build it based on what you've already learned from your games? We've done quite a bit of research on this and asked students about how they felt going forward. Would you like to continue to take another class in this? More than 60% of our kids say absolutely. 74% of the boys, 64% of the girls, 69% of the minorities want to take another class. Even more importantly to us is that the kids are successful in this. Over 60% of our kids have a fully functioning game. More than 80% agree with the statement, I'm good at solving computer problems. And more than 80% of them go on to create a second game or a simulation. So we appreciate getting a chance to offer to talk with you about this, and we welcome your questions and your partnerships.