Hello readers!
So, this week, I became a game developer!
We were assigned to try out some coding softwares which are designed to spark the interests of kids who may have passion for video games/coding/computer science. I chose to try out one called Hour of Code.
As a brief preface, I would like to note that I have very limited experience in writing code. I took Computer Science 20 six or seven years ago, and I sucked at writing code! In that class we used a program called Python to write code, and maybe it was just me, but I was not good at writing code and as a result I have always avoided activities relating to computer science ever since.
Hour of Code features many different “games” which the users choose from a library of options. The user is able to practice writing code for the game which they choose, essentially creating the game for themselves, customizing it, and then being able to share it for their friends to play. This ability to create and share creations with friends really reminded me of the SAMR Model which we discussed earlier in the course. Apps like Hour of Code are redefining the ways in which disciplines like computer science and coding are able to be taught and learned.
I spent an hour or so playing around with Hour of Code, and decided to make a Flappy Bird game, since it seemed simple enough. Below are some screenshots to illustrate the kinds of things that I was doing on Hour of Code.
Looking at the image above (for whatever reason the resolution has gone downhill, so my apologies), you can see that this is a much more simplistic piece of code than the creation that I finished with on the image below. I really enjoyed how the app eases the user into coding, and familiarizes you with some of the language. I feel like if I had access to software like this as a kid who loved to play video games, I would’ve probably seen coding as a much less daunting task when I tried it in high school.
The image above is the final piece of code that I designed. I chose to make a Flappy Santa game, since it’s almost Christmas time! If you would like to try it, here it is.
As always, thank you for reading! I hope you are all doing well as we enter this last stretch of this semester.
Hey Darian, I played your game and I must say I didn’t realize we could share our games with others lol…I complained about that in my blog. I’m left wondering if you feel like this would be a useful thing to teach in the classroom. Is it worth fitting in, and what would we take out if we decided this was important? Would it be an elective for high school students?