TEACHING MY KID TO MAKE A FACE USING CODE.ORG

The kids are on holidays and as you will suspect, there are always on their phones playing games or eating. Sometimes they forget to bath early because of being busy with game playing.

So out of the blue, I asked the younger one if she can consider building a game rather than constantly playing one. She was excited.

She is new to code.org, although I know she loves working with scratch before now. So today I introduced her into code.org- using it to create simple game.

Before going into code.org, I told she and her sister that to build a game, five basic things must be involved.

Story.
You need to have a story for your game. What do you want to write about? This forms a fundamental part of the game.

Planning. For you to build a game, you need to plan your game. For example, what are the elements in the game? Are you going to be a fighter in the game? Is the game going to have sound? All these should be planned before the game development.

Graphics Graphics makes games beautiful. Will you be using sprites? Where can you find them? Are you going online to get them?

Mechanics. What do you want the elements of your game to do? This is a part where you write codes. Will the sprites or graphics in your game move, shoot? This is where you code whatever you want the game to do.

Tracking What are you tracking in your game? You can track scores for people who play the game. How will they win?

First to build a game, it is advised to start with something simple. So, she is starting with something as simple as drawing a face with codes.

INTRODUCING MY KID TO CODE.ORG
She went to code.org and created an account. Of course she is a child, parental guidance is needed so I actually created the account with my details.

Code.org is a block based programming language, so she will be moving blocks and arranging them rather than physically writing codes. However, there is an option of show text where the codes can be shown.

So, once the account is created, she clicked on create, selected game lab.
She clicked on drawing and began dragging the blocks.

She used codes to position the shapes in form of a face
She changed the values of the parameters to vary the sizes of the shapes for the eyes, nose and mouth