On Monday I played Code Monkey on Hour of Code…

It utilized block coding and the objective was to create a game where the monkey could jump over obstacles to reach the end and collect a star. I learned how to add sound effects and other sprites as well as placing events on a loop. I also changed the ‘jump’ function to activate by pressing the space bar rather than clicking the game screen.

Here is a video of my game on exercise #7:

I don’t know if this was a problem from the website or of my own wifi, but when I got to the last exercise the paint, erase, and move (so I could create obstacles farther along my path) functions wouldn’t work…? You can see in this next video that there are random blocks in places and I couldn’t move the bonfire to where I wanted it. As a side note, there are sound effects, but I had to mute my background noise which I guess also muted the computer noise.)

Blocks Jumper Certificate

I feel like I now realize that coding is definitely an activity that would take me awhile to learn. However in my brain this game wasn’t “real” coding because no one other than me is able to use it. I get that this website is for beginners and understanding the basis behind it, but after making my game I still had no idea how I could go about making my own game. Do all game developers have templates like this? How do you start from base zero?

I definitely think coding is important, if we didn’t have it I wouldn’t be writing an online blog right now, there would be no video games or cell phones like we have today. As for teaching coding in the classroom…I’m not so sure this is necessary to try and fit into the curriculum. If kids are finished their work or you know they have a passion for computers, this is definitely something they could do in their free time at school…or start up a Coding Club for after school. I also don’t feel confident enough to teach coding if we were to implement it.

What games did you guys make? Is this something you would implement in your classroom?