Liu, J., Lin, C. H., Wilson, J., Hemmenway, D., Hasson, E., Barnett, Z., & Xu, Y. (2014, March). Making games a snap with Stencyl: a summer computing workshop for K-12 teachers. In Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (pp. 169-174). ACM.

Summary

Type: Empirical

Purpose: "[The authors] present [their] experience, findings, and lessons learned from conducting a one-week Stencyl Game Design Summer Computing Workshop for K-12 teachers. [The] workshop focused on introducing fundamental computing concepts to K-12 teachers using Stencyl, a drag-and-drop game development environment. During the workshop, the teachers developed curriculum games for the subjects they will teach in the following semesters with the help of our workshop tutors" (p. 169)

Findings: "assessment results show that the average score of Stencyl knowledge in the pre-workshop survey was 1.26 out of 5, which was increased to 3.76 in the post-workshop survey and the average score of computing knowledge was improved by 61%" (p. 169). "According to the face-to-face interviews, the most highly praised aspect of the workshop was the tutors in both the normal classroom time and curriculum development time and the participants also wished there would have been more time to cover the workshop materials" (p. 174).

Recommendations:

Methodology

Sample Size: 16

Participant Type: Teachers; professional development done on the university campus; "There were eleven elementary school teachers which accounted for 68.75% of the participants. 18.75% of participants teach middle school and the other 12.5% of participants were high-school teachers. Their areas of teaching are wide-ranging, from Social Science, Science (Biology/Chemistry), Math, English, Reading/Writing, to computer related subjects" (p.173)

Notes: The workshop was done through Lamar Univ., Beaumont, TX