Computer Literacy

by Bob Klingenberg

Bob teaches computers at Mark Twain Senior High School. He has a bird named Louie who likes to groom Bob's mustache and a wife named Patti.

Instructional Objective Following completion of the game, the players will be able to list the type of computer, software, printer and memory requirements needed to complete a specific office task.

Learners/Context The learners are high school students enrolled in a Computer Literacy course. These students have only had one previous computer class in seventh grade.

The course curriculum includes the study of business uses of computers. The students study different models of computers and their different configurations and capabilities. They also learn about the major classes of software and some popular examples of these classes. As employees in an office, they will receive assignments to complete. They must know what combination of equipment and software they need to assemble to complete the job.

Rationale There are different requirements for each job assignment. The total number of possible hardware and software combinations is high. The use of cards is a graphic way of depicting these combinations in an easy to understand manner. An alternative mode of depiction, such as listing, would be tedious and not very conducive to learning.

Rules The rules for the card game are:

The dealer first deals one card from the JOB deck face down to each player, starting with the player to his left. The players should not let the other players see their cards.
The dealer next deals from the COMPONENTS deck, giving each player one card at a time until each player has four cards from that deck.
The players must try to match their COMPONENT cards with the task on the JOB card. The player first dealt to begins discarding cards. Players place discarded cards face up in a stack. The player then draws an equal number of cards from the deck. The next player chooses from the cards the previous player discarded or draws from the deck. Previously discarded cards go on the bottom of the deck.
The next round comes after everyone has had a chance to discard and draw cards. During their turn, each player may show a complete combination or discard and draw again.
When a player has a correct combination, they lay down their cards and earn 100 points. Then, the player draws a new card from the JOB deck. The dealer deals four new cards to the player from the COMPONENT deck. Play continues.
The winner is the first player to earn 500 points.

Card Design

Deck Design The JOB deck contains 20 cards. Each card describes a job from one of the following area:

telecommunications;
word processing;
spreadsheets;
data base design;
desktop publishing;
graphic design;

The COMPONENT'S deck contains 52 cards. The cards are in four categories:

Computer Type-12 cards.
Memory Configuration-12 cards.
Software- 18 cards.
Printer types- 10 cards.

The COMPUTER cards are:

Apple IIe-2 cards.
Apple IIGS- 2 cards.
Mac Classic-3 cards.
Mac IIFX-5 cards.

I had thought of including an IBM card as a wild card. Anyone drawing it would automatically lose 100 points.

The MEMORY CONFIGURATION cards include:

128K-2 cards.
512K-2 cards.
1 meg-3 cards.
2 meg-3 cards.
8 meg-2 cards.

The SOFTWARE cards include:

MS Word 4.0.
Microphone II 3.0.
Pagemaker 4.0.
Super Paint 2.0.
Adobe Illustrator 3.0.
Print Shop for the IIe.
Hyperstudio, Excel 3.0, and Appleworks 2.0.

There are 2 cards of each.

The PRINTER cards include:

Imagewriter II-2 cards.
Stylewriter-3 cards
HP Deskwriter C-2 cards.
Laserwriter-3 cards.

Design Process When I set out to design a card game my first attempt was to create a card game version of Sim Earth. I soon realized that it would require 4 decks and about 300 cards. I am currently producing lesson plans for the new computer literacy text for our district. I felt that this might be a diversion from the district text materials. At this point I'm not certain, but I may develop this into a full fledged game for my class.