AgentDesign: A Tool to Scaffold Software Design for Elementary Students

This paper provides the motivation for the design of a web-based planning tool called AgentDesign, a description of its components, and a discussion of elementary students' ability to use it for creating games. The planning tool presented in this paper was used to engage elementary students in an activity to design and then create a video game using an agent-based programming environment. The design of the planning tool was informed by prior research and literature on concept development. The tool scaffolded the design process by having students (1) describe their game, (2) identify agents, (3) describe agent behavior, and (4) use those descriptions to identify useful algorithms. The set of algorithms used were called computational thinking patterns (CTPs), and sample code was provided for each CTP to assist the programming process. From the information provided by the student a summary was created to show needed agents and helpful programming code.