By Kylie Jue and Oscar R. Vanegas

*The 9 Dots Product team is excited to announce* The Rewriters, the first module of our new game-based curriculum, launching in fall 2025.

In order to give you, our teachers, a truly immersive look into our next-generation curriculum, this piece follows the same format as our new lessons, which builds on the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study’s 5E instructional model. This lesson structure involves 5 distinct steps: engaging the student through the introduction of a central problem or concept, allowing the student to independently explore the problem before explaining key concepts more explicitly, elaborating on the concept through more practice problems, and evaluating the student via a check for understanding. We invite you to go through these steps with us as you read.

Engage

Let’s go back four years to 2021. The 9 Dots Get Coding curriculum was launched in 2017 with the goal of making a transformative computer science education accessible to all K-6 students. We had supported our teachers remotely through the pandemic. We had been around long enough that our 6th graders had been coding since 2nd grade and our 3rd graders had started in kindergarten.

It was at the start of the 2021-22 school year when Yoanna, one of our Impact Managers, visited Mr. W¹, a 6th grade teacher who had been teaching coding with PixelBots, 9 Dots’ flagship coding platform, since the curriculum was created. Unlike previous years, when Yoanna arrived at Mr. W’s class, his students didn’t express the familiar excitement for coding. Instead, Mr. W and his students were ready with feedback.

“We actually did not teach a lesson today,” Yoanna explained. “The students aren't as engaged in coding. They said things like ‘it's boring,’ and a lot of it was said from half the class verbally….[Mr. W] basically said we need to step up our game.”

Mr. W’s students had been coding with PixelBots for nearly four years, and they were ready for something more challenging.

In many ways, this was a great problem to have. It meant that our 9 Dots students were understanding the core coding concepts well enough that they were actually tired of completing PixelBots challenges by the time they hit upper elementary school. But now we had a problem to solve: How could we change our curriculum to better engage our older students?

Tackling this question inspired the next chapter of the 9 Dots curriculum.

Explore

*Research supports the need for more accessible computer science education.*

Research has shown that students’ STEM identities begin to decline around age 10, dropping around 10 percentage points between grades 4 and 8. We see similar drops in student motivation and coding proficiency between 2nd and 6th grade in our 9 Dots data. In a country where women still hold only 35 percent of tech roles, Black women 3 percent, and Latina women often less than 2 percent, we can’t afford to lose students from computer science education in elementary school.

To follow along with our 5E structure, we ask you to explore the problem with us by first considering the question by yourself: Think about the last time you were asked to teach something you knew your students were struggling to give their attention to or identify with. Maybe you yourself didn’t enjoy the topic. What did you do to keep students engaged?

We interviewed teachers across grades and asked, “What’s your least favorite subject or lesson to teach? Is there anything you do to make the lesson more enjoyable for you or your students?” Several teachers turn to external rewards – handing out treats for answering questions or using a tool like Kahoot to turn the lesson into a competition. Others might draw connections to a real-world topic that students get excited about. Many find ways to make lessons more hands-on and tangible, interweaving art projects and moments of creativity.

But regardless of their methodology, we found that teachers ended up distilling the problem into the same recurring theme. They were implicitly – sometimes explicitly – asking, “How can I make lessons fun?” Their goal was always to bring joy back into their classrooms.

Explain

Now that you’ve had a chance to ponder the problem yourself, we’ll dive into explaining our solution – our vision for the next-generation 9 Dots curriculum.

When posed the question of how to make computer science fun, we turned to game-based learning (GBL)², a pedagogical strategy that our existing PixelBots curriculum has already borrowed from. Broadly speaking, GBL borrows elements from game design in order to create a more engaging, active-learning student experience. For PixelBots in particular, we use the principles of goal-oriented problems and instant feedback. Lessons contain a set of challenges for students to solve with clearly defined goals that support learning outcomes. Students can track their progress by seeing how many problems they’ve completed, unlocking bonus challenges at the end of each lesson. They also receive immediate feedback in the form of success and error messages when they run their code.

However, PixelBots is still missing two core components of GBL that use joy to create engagement: storytelling as narrative motivation and learning through play.

PixelBots lessons have recurring characters with minimal narrative, and the lessons rely on direct instruction to teach students the key coding concepts. The best games, however, use narrative and art to immerse the player in their worlds, giving the user a built-in context in which to both learn and apply their knowledge. Through careful scaffolding, good games create an environment where users learn organically and are motivated by challenge rather than discouraged by it.

Our existing PixelBots curriculum (left) includes recurring characters who support direct instruction, while our updated curriculum (right) leans on storytelling and fully immersive lessons to increase student engagement.

So as we embarked on the development of our next-generation curriculum in 2021, we decided to combine GBL with the 5E structure in order to prioritize teacher ease of use and student engagement respectively. The role of the teacher is that of both storyteller and co-player. Lessons are presented as narrative episodes that the teacher reads via slides, and interspersed throughout the story are moments of gameplay that allow both teacher and students to practice problem-solving in context.

*Rodger W. Bybee and colleagues designed the 5E instructional model to create teachable moments in STEM classrooms.*

Lessons begin with storytelling to engage listeners in the learning goal and new concepts for the day, and then give them time to independently explore those ideas in an initial exemplifying problem via gameplay. This exploration creates a teachable moment that is followed by discussion and then explicit narrative explanation, where characters go through the initial problem as a worked example. Learners then return to gameplay during the elaborate section of the lesson where they get to apply their newly acquired skills. The lesson wraps up with storytelling that includes both a narrative cliffhanger and interactive polls or discussion to evaluate learning goal comprehension.

But don’t just take our word for it. Rather than just providing an explanation of our next-generation curriculum structure, we want you to experience it yourself.

Elaborate

Our first game, The Rewriters, is a 10-lesson module that teaches problem-solving to 3rd graders. We chose to start with a foundational computer science skill for our first game because 3rd grade will lay the groundwork for students’ computational thinking. Students will be able to apply their problem-solving skills as they advance into more complex CS topics in the upper elementary grades.

The Rewriters builds on the mechanics of indie puzzle game Baba Is You, but with original art, narrative, and scaffolded problem sets designed for 3rd graders. Lessons focus on teaching a four-step problem-solving framework that can also be applied across disciplines:

Problem-Solving Framework

Understand the problem
Plan a solution
Try the solution
Reflect on the solution

In our first lesson, players wake up as the main character, Sol, in a world made up of rules that determine what you can and cannot do. Despite having lost their memory, they learn that they are a Rewriter, one who has the power to change and rewrite the rules around them. The number of Rewriters has dwindled as time has passed, plunging the world into a perpetual state of status quo – predictable, dull, and joyless. Now Sol must uncover more about their forgotten past in order to bring change back. On their journey over the rest of the lessons, they meet new friends along the way and help spread the message that, despite what they’ve been told, change is good because it leads to growth.

We’ve already seen the increased engagement and resilience among our 3rd graders in the eight classrooms we piloted with in the 2023-24 school year. We gave early access to the full curriculum to 20 classrooms in 2024-25 and will be doing a full launch in fall of the 2025-26 school year.

Now is your chance to try it yourself. True to the 5E structure, we want to elaborate on what we’ve covered so far by giving you first-hand exposure. Jump into the world of The Rewriters with our first lesson here.

Evaluate

At this stage of the lesson, we would administer a poll and have a discussion to evaluate your understanding of how game-based learning can help us create engaging lessons about complex topics like computer science.

But since we’re not physically there in the room with you (and you as educators understand the importance of assessment), we instead pose some questions that we’d like you to reflect on independently:

How did you feel playing the game? Were there moments of joy for you?
Think of a moment where you might have struggled or didn’t know what to do. How did you apply the problem-solving framework (maybe implicitly) to help you move forward?
How might you apply the principles of game-based learning or the 5E structure to your own lessons?

Computer science is so much more than just learning to code, and our next-generation curriculum aims to hit on the big ideas in CS beyond just coding. Games are great pedagogical tools not only because they help create engagement, but also because they provide a medium to represent and teach about complex systems (think Monopoly, Pandemic, Minecraft, etc.).

Game-based lessons enable students to enter a flow state via play and make learning outcomes sticky via compelling narrative instruction. They build students’ resilience to failure by creating moments of joy that keep players coming back again and again.

On the teacher’s end, reading a story aloud for students provides a familiar task as an entry point into teaching a new subject. By playing the game alongside their students, educators model how to learn and practice problem-solving while minimizing expert blindspots. And at key moments of explanation, we provide storytelling videos so teachers and students can watch and learn together.

But perhaps most importantly, by experiencing the story and game with one another, teachers and students co-create moments of joy in the classroom.

We could end on a narrative cliffhanger as our Rewriters lessons do, but instead, we’ll share that we're excited to continue building students’ computational thinking skills in our next game. Using game-based learning and the 5E structure, we'll focus specifically on more advanced coding skills for upper elementary students. We hope you’ll follow along and join us on our journey to create joyful CS education for all teachers and students.

Footnotes

[1] Pseudonym is used throughout.

[2] When discussing game-based learning, it’s important to distinguish it from gamification. Although commonly confused for one another, especially in the edtech space, the two are not the same. Gamification might involve tacking on a point system to existing challenges or handing out badges at the end of each lesson, but game-based learning leans into the principles of game design itself to enhance pedagogy and use games as educational experiences.

Centering Joy: Game-based learning in our next-gen curriculum