In the Game Design Project, I created together with the students and the teacher an environment that used the design of computer games as a context for learning. Sixteen fourth-grade children worked for six months making games in Logo to teach fractions to younger students. They met every day for one hour and wrote in their notebooks about their ideas, plans, and designs. They also discussed issues related to fractions, teaching, programming, and games. They gave presentations to each other and met once a month with their prospective users. In addition, they created advertisements and cover designs and wrote documentation for their games. All taken together, the students designed a fully finished product.
It was my intention to implement the Game Design Project as one model of a constructionist learning environment—a place where children, each at their own pace, could learn through building a complex product for use by others. The following sections describe the research issues pursued with the implementation of this project, the theoretical foundation of the pedagogy learning through design, and a review of the research on learning Logo programming and fractions.