The next time you and your family visit the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester, keep an eye out at the baboon enclosure – you may get a chance to see some Fairport ingenuity at work! Third grade students in Theresa Sanna and Grace VanPutte’s class at Brooks Hill put their coding brains to work this spring as part of a unique project that scientists hope will help them better understand cognition in monkeys.

“The Primate Portal” is a collaborative project with Carnegie Mellon University and Rochester Institute of Technology. Researchers have trained a troop of baboons to play brain teaser games on a touchscreen computer. The baboons’ reactions, responses and gameplay are all recorded and made available to other researchers. Through a connection to one of the Portal’s lead researchers, the students in Ms. Van Putte and Mrs. Sanna’s class were invited to design and build games for the baboon troop to play.

So – what’s the best way to support a third grade class as each student conceives of, designs, codes and tests their own interactive game? 

Enter Instructional Technology Coaches Travis Wood and Jenna Platt, who worked with the students throughout the project. Wood and Platt used coding platform Scratch to guide students through the process. Luckily, these students already have a head start: all elementary school students in Fairport spend time in their building’s SPARK Labs, building a foundation of STEM and coding knowledge. Sanna and VanPutte’s students had already used Scratch in SPARK Lab to code an animated joke.

“Our process as coaches was to understand what [Primate Project leader] Dr. Jessica Cantlon needed for her research and to translate those needs into criteria and constraints. We utilize criteria and constraints in the SPARK lab to help students understand the projects that we work on,” said Wood. “We gave the students just enough to get started and they were able to piece much of the rest of the game together with little support.”

The game formula encourages the monkeys to follow a character as it moves around the screen and touch it when it pops up in a new place. Students coded their games to limit the number of attempts the baboon can make, to play sounds for mistakes and successes, and to show an end screen after the final move.

“The students were constantly thinking about their audience (the baboons) as they were developing their games, which made the code not the major focus, but instead the route that they could use to work with the baboons,” said Platt.

The games will be run through a final round of testing by the researchers at the Seneca Park Zoo before the baboons get their first look. Wood and Platt are working on a way to livestream the gameplay so that students can watch as the monkeys take a crack at some of Brooks Hill’s best coding.