The beauty of adapting an already successful game is boundless. My most able coders were able to add a score for every time the main character successfully traversed the barricade, sound for encouragement, relevant World War II effects and background, and a dramatic, “Game over” effect at the end. Others replaced their main character with text such as, “Oh no. For some, there was a death march song and the spitfire spinning before turning bright red and then becoming invisible. My students use an “if” the “main character” “touches” the “barricade” series of blocks and then their imaginations took over. Now we simply needed to code our main character to do something dramatic if it touched the barricade. Step 3: Program drama elements with sound and visuals To randomize the gap in the middle, we added a “random” block in the y coordinates for the barricade. Now students had the impression of a continuous stream of barricades moving across the screen. ![]() ![]() Placing a repeat loop around these instructions. Students suggested several different ways of managing the next step but we settled on this process:Įntering coordinates to take it back to the left-hand side of the screen before setting invisibility back to 0 percent. This caused the barricade to move across the screen but it then came to a halt on the far left, which was no good to us as we wanted a continuous succession of barricades for our main character to fly through. Students used a series of emojis with a gap in the middle and then rotated it 90 degrees and inserted it on the far right of their screens.Ĭoding it to travel across the screen was a simple matter of using a “move” block and entering coordinates at the far left of the screen. Next step was to create something moving across the screen, with a gap for the main character to navigate through. This gave a small jump and students experimented with different numbers until they achieved the desired effect. If the main character was tapped, we changed y by +2. Now we started to tackle the problem of how to stop our character from its perennial descent and added an “if” block. Step 1: Choose a character and make it moveįirst, we chose an image to be the main character and inserted at the center of the screen.Īs a class, we discussed how we would make the main character continuously sink and realized this was a simple case of coding the character to move a negative number of pixels on the y axis and then ensuring this was in a repeat loop. I am using generic instructions rather than instructions specific to Hopscotch so the lesson can be taught using any platform. These were the steps we used to code the game. It's a perfect fit for addressing the ISTE Innovative Designer Standard! In the project they analyzed an already successful app, decomposed the coding behind the game, recreated it and then adapted it - all the while, debugging when problems occurred. ![]() ![]() Instead of pipes, my game had Messerschmitt fighter pilots and the player’s role was to keep the spitfire in the air by tapping the screen and navigating it through the enemy aircraft.īringing this work into the classroom was so much fun and the children were fully engaged throughout. Using all the same coding elements as Flappy Bird, but with a spitfire plane instead of a bird. At that time, we were about to embark on our World War II unit, and throwing a chubby bird into the mix would have jarred in its irrelevancy.Īnd so, I created a game that I called Flappy Spitfire. Obviously, I wanted to facilitate creativity and for my students to use new skills to create a game that was relevant to other learning in the class. Initially, I felt quite chuffed about recreating a viral game, but as an educator, I knew that I didn’t want my children simply copying a game that was already in existence. The coding behind the game is basic, and whether using Scratch, Hopscotch, KODU, Tynker or the myriad of other apps and coding software, the game can be replicated. I am, of course, referring to Flappy Bird. Watching my children tapping away on screens to support an aerodynamically repressed bird remain afloat and navigate its way through a series of pipes, it occurred to me that an extraordinarily simple game had taken the world by storm. Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education.
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