In the last few months, I've taken on some new work in teaching and curriculum design. There's a small opportunity cost to this, in that it leaves me less time for game design. However, I think that's more than balanced by benefits that come from the experience of working with new people in new environments.
The biggest project is a class called Electric Art, a class that I've been teaching at the One Spark Academy (OSA). Electric Art is a making-and-tinkering type class for middle school students, with project-based activities that combine art and technology. More specifically, the activities are centered around sewn circuits and small Arduino microcontrollers, the kind of stuff that you find at Adafruit and SparkFun.
We're now in the second quarter of the class, and for this second quarter, I've taken things up a notch in terms of organization and sophistication. I've created a progress map for the students to follow. It's a thing akin to a skills tree in an RPG. Whenever a student completes a task, we fill in the appropriate box on the map. In this way, students can see what they've done, what lies ahead, and some of the big-picture choices that are available to them.
Each task will (eventually) have its own workbook. The workbooks are cousins the lab handouts used in most college science classes. These workbooks are thoughtfully written and thoroughly illustrated so that students can work semi-independently, at their own speed and in their own way. At this moment, I've developed about a third of the task workbooks to a late-draft state.
As an example, one task involves connecting a Gemma (a sewable Arduino variant) to a NeoPixel (a nifty sort of smart RGB LED) and learning how to write code for the Gemma so as to control the NeoPixel. The first few pages in that workbook look like this:
[gallery columns="4" ids="832,833,835,834"]
Right now, these workbooks are a useful teaching aid, but they have enough bugs that they only work well for me (the author). Over the next couple months, I hope to be able to neaten them up enough so that I can put these up on Teachers Pay Teachers. This would extend the work of Mindful Mammoth, and our web presence, in a new and useful direction.