Outreach for improved student performance: a game design and development curriculum

We present a curriculum for computer science outreach using Game Maker. This curriculum has been adapted over six iterations of a 10-week, middle school apprenticeship on Game Design and Development. Through multiple iterations we have adjusted for many of the issues one could expect to encounter when running a similar outreach program. While many outreach curricula are independent from coursework, our video game design curriculum is targeted to address generalized student learning objectives (Math and English Language Arts) and designed for integration into middle school classrooms. We demonstrate that students' language arts and math classroom performance have improved with participation in this apprenticeship.