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My kid Nemo is lucky to go to a really great school: Ann Arbor Open School @ Mack. One of my very favorite things they do at Open School is called Focus Studies: three times a year, for 2 weeks, a mini-elective is shoehorned into each day. There are usually 25 or so different Focus Studies to choose from, offered by teachers, staff, and parents. Some are creative, like knitting, building a model, poetry, or writing and staging a play; or there’s a Basketball clinic, a Euchre tournament, a Spanish class, all kinds of stuff. Last year I offered a Focus Study called “Pokémon and Probability” for grades 5-8, and it was a blast. Of course, I learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t, how to engage the kids and keep them focused on some content that’s above grade level. I wrote out lesson plans and everything, but I didn’t keep notes on what happened, so much of what we did was lost to the mists of time. Well, not exactly, but I wanted to blog about it and didn’t, so I’m fixing that this time around.

This year, with the assistance of Eric ‘rhymes with toaster’ Klooster, I’m offering Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-powered Battle Cars: The Focus Study. Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars is a wonderful little game from the Playstation Network that essentially boils down to playing soccer using , well, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars. One thing that I found last year when talking about content that the kids had had essentially no exposure to (like, say, the concept of a spreadsheet!?) was that kids were reluctant to throw out guesses to leading questions if they didn’t know the answer. So, to encourage kids to think and guess, I’m going to award tokens for good guesses or right answers (and artificially spread them around, especially to the little guys) and the kid with the most tokens at the end of the discussion advance to play the game… the idea is to use this game as a framework to talk about things to which kids grades 1-6 aren’t usually exposed. Here’s the basic idea of what we’ll talk about, and I’ll post each night about how it’s going.

Day 1: Overview of Game, What We’ll Cover, How to Play.
Everybody gets a turn, 2v2 and 1v1.

Day 2: Physics and Math: Gravity, Velocity, Momentum, Relative Speed.
2v2 playoffs for top token getters

Day 3: Graphics: 2D and 3D, wireframes, textures, lighting, special effects.
2v2 playoffs for top token getters

Day 4 (ejk): Memory: game code vs. variables, what the game needs to track.
2v2 playoffs for top token getters

Day 5 (ejk): Programming: collision, networking, graphics & physics engines.
2v2 playoffs for top token getters

Day 6: Game Design: Who works on a game, Specifications, Designing for Fun.
Mini-game modes, design your own mini-game

Day 7: Full Tournament for 2-player teams