Contents - Cultural View

AgentSheets 16
AgentSheets
rule based visual programming
Paradigm object-oriented, educational, Conversational Programming
Appeared in 1999
Designed by Alexander Repenning
Stable
release
3.0 (February 7, 2010)
Influenced by Lisp, Logo, Smalltalk
Influenced Etoys, Scratch
OS OS X, Windows, Linux
Website http:/ / www. agentsheets. com
AgentSheets is an educational Cyberlearning [1] tool to create Web-based simulation games. AgentSheets is used
worldwide to teach students programming and related information technology skills through game design. The
built-in drag-and-drop language is accessible enough that students without programming background can make their
own simple Frogger-like game, and publish it on the Web, in their first session. At the same time, AgentSheets is
powerful enough to make sophisticated The Sims-like games with artificial intelligence. To transition from visual
programming to more traditional programming students can render their games into Java source code.
AgentSheets is supported by a middle and high school curriculum called Scalabable Game Design aligned with the
ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS). The mission of this project is to reinvent computer
science in public schools by motivating & educating all students including women and underrepresented
communities to learn about computer science through game design starting at the middle school level. Through this
curriculum students build increasingly sophisticated games and, as part of this process, learn about computational
concepts at the level of computational thinking that are relevant to game design as well as to computational science.
The curriculum is made available through the Scalable Game Design Wiki [2] . Research investigating motivational
aspects of computer science education in public schools is currently exploring the introduction of game design in
representative regions of the USA including technology hubs, inner city, rural and remote/tribal areas. Previous
research has already found that game design with AgentSheets is universally accessible across gender as well as
ethnicity and is not limited to students interested in playing video games [3] .
The results [4] of the NSF ITEST program supported research investigating motivational and educational aspects of
introducing computer science at the middle school level are extremely positive in terms of motivational levels,
number of participants and participation of women and underrepresented communities. The participation is
extremely high because most middle schools participating in the study have made Scalable Game Design a module
that is part of existing required courses (e.g., computer power with keyboarding and power point). Many of the
middle schools instruct all of their students in scalable game design reaching in some schools over 900 students per