When I first prepared for teaching skills relevant to CoSpace Rescue I thought this would be a relatively poor platform for learning proper software engineering techniques and computational thinking. After teaching CoSpace-based curriculum for a few months in both Primary (Zhenghua) and Secondary (Pei Hwa) CCAs I have to admit the virtual simulation platform is starting to grow on me.
Unfortunately, as I have become more enthusiastic about the CoSpace framework, I’ve also simultaneously realized that my first instincts about it are also true. As a gamification system for coding, CoSpace Rescue works well. For the Primary School level, the GUI really helps in removing obstacles to getting started, as opposed to an all-text-based coding environment. Kids can quickly add rules and test various event-based decision trees, without knowing any coding language.
They quickly internalize boolean operator concepts, and competing decision priorities and choices. It isn’t a very big jump from that to utilizing state variables to create simple state machines. Still, it has been challenging to get students used to this environment to shed the security and comfort of the game GUI with the freedom and efficiency of pure and abstract C coding. Without the ability to abstract from the Simulation Gaming environment to the underlying C code, the students are unable to make the leap of faith and leap of computational confidence to go hacking. That’s where the benefits of the platform start hitting a serious wall – students inculcated in nothing else for several years turn into great CoSpace Rescue developers, but not great developers… A work in progress.
Still, I’m proud of the Junior team at Zhenghua who managed to clinch the ambiguous “Judge’s Award”!
how about this year?
Thanks for asking!
I am teaching computing/robotics using Cospace again, in both schools, and there are a few students in the Secondary school who have now been able to take it to the next level, and are happily hacking their “AI” in C directly.
So, now I think the big problem with the platform is that if you are not in control of a multi-year curriculum, you will end up with just a game, and not a computer science educational tool.
My curriculum within the year (Secondary), and now shaping into a multi-year framework roughly follows:
– Basic Game Mechanics
– Some useful mathematics around ranges, inequalities, and Boolean logic, priority
– Strategy and Basic Algorithms
– Obstacle avoidance, wayfinding
– State Machines
– C Programming (I use repl.it with my own tutorials)
If you have suggestions or further questions, let us know!
I’ve also started mentoring students in Cospace Grand Prix a bit, but the Primary league is a little too limited. Also the Grand Prix precompiler churns out some very obfuscated C code, and you wouldn’t really want to use that as a base for teaching.
Nice Simulation Game Environment. maybe in the future it can be widely applied to elementary schools for teaching
is this available for online training?
Ali, Thanks for your question – we provide bespoke online training on a case-by-case basis for any virtual platform, from CoSpace Rescue to GearsBot and general Python coding.
If you want to contact us to discuss such an opportunity, please reach us via info@aposteriori.com.sg