Game Design 201
- GRADES 6-8
- BEGINNER
- WEB
- 25 LESSONS
Description
A fast-paced introduction to programming for students in grades 6-8. Introduce programming fundamentals to your class as they build two arcade-inspired games from start to finish. In Cannon Crasher, a physics game, they harness the power of the physics engine to program realistic jumps, projectiles, and bouncing balls. The Adventure Game features a knight who has to defeat enemies to reach treasure. Students program arrow keys, fluid motion, hero and enemy behavior, and winning conditions.
Topics Covered: Events, keyboard and mouse interaction, conditional loops, nested loops, functions, and sending and receiving messages. Basic physics programming such as gravity, bounding boxes, bouncing, projectiles, impulses, and collisions.
What Students Learn
- Build complex multi-level games
- Use variables to keep score
- Use cloning to create actors programmatically
- Build algorithms using complex conditional logic
- Build physics projects using gravity, impulse, and velocity
- Understand parallelism with multiple scripts
- Program different behaviors for different actors
- Publish projects to the Web
- Troubleshoot and debug programs
Technical Requirements
* Online courses require a modern desktop computer, laptop computer, Chromebook, or Netbook with Internet access and a Chrome (29+), Firefox (30+), Safari (7+), or Edge (20+) browser. No downloads required.