Day 5 – DU – Teacher Game Institute

Programming

I was in early to work on some errors I had in my code from yesterday. Problem solved. Need a background image for my timer. Each time the timer puts up a new number it was writing it over the old number. With a background it throws that up first, then writes the new number. Spent our time this morning using a forloop to create more than one bee on the game. And I corrected many errors….with help. In some ways the programming I’ve been doing for years, is starting to make sense, with a little formal training(doh!)

Pixels

Today was perspective day. We learned how to draw boxes above and below our eye level. We started with some basics in 2D. Even drawing a room that looked as if there was door at the far end of the room, and a road that went off into the distance between a row of trees, I got fancy and put a hill in mine! Then we went to the drawing horses, and drew boxes that were stacked. Will try to get a photo of my work posted. The point is, that again this was basic stuff. Stuff that I can remember, and teach to my class. I can see the importance of pulling the kids off of the computer and doing this.

Pedagogy

We watched the abbreviated version of “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch. Then went through some expanded points from his book, by the same title. I met Randy last summer in July, before he gave this lecture. I was sitting in the Computer Science lab at Carnegie Mellon at the Alice Summer Workshop, listening to Randy talk about the development of Alice. I decided to take a look at his web page, as I’d done with all of the other people involved in the workshop. I discovered on his website, that Randy had pancreatic cancer, and had been fighting it. From that moment on, I’ve had a great respect for Randy, because he came in to talk to us about Alice, not about his cancer! When I saw “The Last Lecture” just a few weeks later, it was very difficult to watch, yet inspiring. I had some of the same emotions yesterday. But the abbreviated version, is not near as good or moving as the entire lecture (It is worth the watch). We discussed Chapter 5 in our text book, and then answered some journal questions. I am going to complete these later….I don’t think I did them justice in class…..I need to ponder for longer than 20 minutes, to answer these.

Play

Today in play we looked at some games that are probably quite controversial, and some were disturbing. I’ll try to get the links in here, but know ahead of time some of these deal with very controversial topics. Rafael was trying to get us set up for thinking about Humane Games.

We started out with a game titled September 12th, the author doesn’t refer to this as a game, but as a toy, because its not win able. I just don’t even know if I can begin to describe this game…Another game at the same location was titled, Madrid. This game is a little easier to describe.  The image was several people wearing t-shirts that said I Love _______ (here you could fill in the blank of any city where terrorist actions have happened).  Each person is holding a candle, the player must go around and click on the candles to keep the candles burning bright.  This game was very thought provoking, and we had some good discussion in class regarding all of the symbolism.

After that we took a look at the Free Rice game.  I had seen this game before, as my sister-in-law plays it.  The next game was Darfur is Dying, This was actually a fairly disturbing game.  You’re given a family unit (parent and six children) and your first task is to forage for water.  We tried choosing the father, but the game told us that adult males don’t forage for water, so we had to choose another family member.  We had the mother go and forage for water.  In the game she must run across the desert to get the water, and avoid the military patrols.  She was captured.  So when we were given our next task, we no longer had the mother as part of our family unit.

Our assignment was to think of a game that had to do with sad.  So I gave this some thought after class.  I have a couple of ideas, but I’m not sure how they will work.  Are they too controversial, or too close to home?  I’ve got some more time today to continue thinking about this.