Programming
We started the day by taking a look at collision detections in Greenfoot. I have now got my flower to moving using the arrow keys, and my bee still moves about randomly. When they intersect, the bee disappears, as the flower is now a poisonous flower.
We finished the morning session by working with a timer. I’ve got the code in, but I’m still working on some errors. Hopefully it will easy to get it going tomorrow.
Pixels
We started with an introduction/review of Color Theory. While I’m familiar with some, I’m not as versed as the art teachers, and some of the programmers were less experienced than myself. Susan, talked about a book “Picture This: How Pictures Work” by Molly Bang. She really recommended this book as a good book to use to discuss shapes and colors for animations and web pages. The book discusses how to use minimal color and shapes for maximum effect. 
We did one of the exercises out of this book. We were to work independently within a group to make an image, by cutting out shapes only. The theme was – A bird or birds attacking a victim- we could only use 3 colors + white, and we had to agree on these colors in our group.
During the assignment we were to discuss certain questions about what we were trying to convey within our group. We were also to go through several iterations of what this image would be prior to actually gluing. I found this difficult. Once I had placed my pieces I was unwilling to make changes….however, in the end I did, and I did like the results.
Pedagogy
We began with some research details on female-male brain developments. Debra also discussed chapter 4 of our text. Then as an intro into Humane Game Prompts we watched a Nickelback video. The idea would be show this clip to your students to get them thinking about more humane game scenarios. Then we were given a list of prompts for humane games (so we can get our students away from wanting to blow everything up!). And we were asked to write a few more on our blog. These will be posted on our individual blogs on the P4 server.
Play
We spent the first part of our play time finishing our design from yesterday. I had to make some modifications to my instructions. I had to have someone playing the role of the algorithms that would be written for a computer game. And I need to work with the props I had. 
So my goat became a Nun that could take away your chocolate. The Nun could move in any direction, the player could only move horizontally or vertically.
The blue flattened marbles represent chocolate, and are positioned in various cities/towns around Switzerland. During the Play Testing, I learned a couple of things:
- I can allow the Nun to move in any direction, but really she should only move once for every two moves of the player.
- It would also be good to have the Nun speed up or slow down in some areas.
- Maybe have a zone around that player that might make the Nun key in on the player, and have something that might slow her down as well.
Another great day of Game Development. Looking forward to tomorrow.
