App Development Club: Starting on our first game

Today, there were 31 students in the after-school App Group. One student had apologised for a medical reason and another one was absent from school.

We started on a simple game that would help consolidate what we have learnt so far note my use of the first person plural, as I am sorting things out myself. This is what was achieved today:
  • Words falling across the screen (using transition.to)
  • An event handler for the "touch" event.
  • When the user touches the words, they disappear.
This may not seem like much, but this simple App made them understand the concept of event handling. They also had to do some debugging, which was nice. For the first time, they had to write their own code and then look over it to find - mostly spelling - mistakes.

A few of them replaced the words with an image and one student had three different sentences coming in from different parts of the screen.

We will make this App a little more involved next time. I hope to have and iOS developer license sorted out in the next week or two so they can finish this term's sessions (six in total) with something on their mobile devices.

It was very rewarding to see the joy on some of their faces when they got it working. I really look forward to these sessions each week.

Exciting news: Corona SDK celebrity, Peach Pellen, has agreed to appear by Skype in two weeks' time. I bet the girls will be inspired by her.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Baalbek (City of the Sun)

We have just returned from a day in Baalbek. Internet access is down, so I am writing this to debrief myself. I have always wanted to go to Baalbek as it is an iconic place in Lebanon. I didn't know much about what was there, except for the fact that I would find a well preserved Roman temple. It was a very Lebanese experience! The army had come in and shut down the whole place in preparation for a visit to the Baalbek festival by the President, the Prime Minister and several other dignitaries. We found ourselves pleading our case with those in charge. We then gained the concession of being allowed to join a group of French tourists who were being looked after by a well-connected guide. The guide was very knowledgeable. He conducted the tour entirely in French. The temples I learned that the first temple was built by the Phoenecians. It was dedicated to Baal. Bek came from the name of the location, the Bekaa valley. The Romans then transformed it into the largest temple dedicated t
Read more

Book Review: The Math(s) Fix - Part 1 of 2

Image
The Math(s) Fix is Conrad Wolfram's case for teaching mathematics with the assumption that computers exist! To be clear from the beginning, Wolfram is not advocating that we solve the same problems but with a greater reliance on computers and calculators. He wants us to recognise that computers have revolutionised the discipline of mathematics and that we need to reflect this change in our curricula. In the following lines, I will present a summary of Wolfram's thesis, as I understand it. My aim is to give you enough of an idea so you can decide whether you want to read the book for yourself. This part will concentrate on the case that the book builds for a radical change of the maths curriculum. Part 2 will explain the alternative in more detail.
Read more