Globaloria
- Games, A., Kane, L.
- Exploring Adolescent’s STEM Learning Through Scaffolded Game Design. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. pp. 1–8 ACM, New York, NY, USA (2011).
Globaloria is a learning environment developed by the World Wide Workshop Foundation (www.WorldWideWorkshop.org), which aims to advance STEM knowledge and skills among middle and high school children, teachers, and school leaders, by teaching them to design their own educational simulations, animations and computer games using the Adobe Flash environment and the Actionscript programming language. The learning philosophy behind the Globaloria platform and curriculum is based on the work done by Idit Harel and Seymour Papert on Constructionism, an epistemological perspective that sees knowledge development and learning as happening “especially felicitously in contexts where the learner is engaged in the construction of a public entity, whether a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe”.
In general, Globaloria aims to support the evolution of computational skills through a structured online curriculum that focuses on Flash STEM game design, situated in an online community of students, educators and game designers, and scaffolded by a framework of Web 2.0 technologies (wikis, online videos, interactive tutorials). Like SAGD, the curriculum takes on a project-based approach to guide the constructionist process within the school classroom, and students work on school-year long game design projects supported by a Globaloria teacher
