On Saturday my oldest daughter and I both happened to get up really early for some reason. We started playing around with Scratch, a cool new project from MIT that I’ve blogged about before. And we made our very own video game!
In this game, you are a cute little creature named Gobo. You have to fly on your magic carpet and steal the fortune cookie from the Dragon’s bowl of magical cheese puffs. But watch out - the dragon breathes fire and *really* likes his cheese puffs!
^ Click the image above to play!
The creative ideas all belong to Abby (my daughter.) We had a lot of fun making this game. But where is the educational value in a game like this, you ask?
Well, you’re right, the game itself isn’t educational. But the process of making it with Scratch was. Scratch provides you with a cool little game building environment, like the one shown here.
To build a game, you drag “sprites” on to the stage. These sprites are characters and objects in the game. They provide a whole bunch of sprites for you, and you can draw or import your own. Once you’ve imported some sprites like Gobo, the Dragon or the fortune cookie in our case, you then build up logic of what will happen in the game.
For example, we set up a way for the player to move Gobo around on the screen with the arrow keys, and we set up the Dragon to move around and defend his bowl of cheesy puffs.
To do this, you literally drag blocks of logic onto the “script” area, and build the program logic by connecting these blocks. You have to think in terms of “IF this happens, THEN make this happen.” Or WHEN a certain event occurs, move the character to this X and Y position. This is the type of logic that you use when writing computer software, and it’s a nice way to introduce kids to this in such a fun context. My daughter was actually learning how to program a computer without even realizing it. A normally difficult and technical task suddenly becomes fun when the context is creating your own fun game to play and share with your friends.
And when you are done, you can share your creations with others on the web. We’re thinking of hosting a game making contest here at KidConfidence. We could have a lot of fun creating and sharing games with each other. Let us know if you’re ready to create a video game too! And stay tuned for the details of our contest…
on January 6th, 2008 at 12:22 am
its fyn
on June 21st, 2008 at 9:36 am
Count us in! We’d love to participate. My kids love Scratch and have made many games on it. We’ll stay tuned for the details.
Thanks!