The landscape can be modified easily by building up layers. You can create adventure games where you must seek out treasure or rescue someone, racing games where you create a track and outwit your opponents, and platform games where you collect tokens to complete the levels. The possibilities are endless. There is also a large community of Koduers who can help you develop games and who also have uploaded thousands of examples to the web.
Scratch is probably the best known and most widely used in schools. It is a platform which allows programmers to design games and other applications using a set of block commands which bolt together. A new 2.0 version came out midway through 2013 which added many new features, including moving Scratch online. There are many advantages to Scratch being online. The first is that the user can access their projects anywhere, which is invaluable for encouraging children to code both at school and at home. It also means that collaboration is so much easier. The you can draw, upload to use sprites and backgrounds from the Scratch gallery. You can make your characters move in response to key stroke to make classic arcade type games. The sensing commands allow you to make much more nuanced set of behaviours. The ‘data’ blocks opens the gateway to creating
scoring systems within your games. You can even use your webcam and body gestures to interact with you games. You can play and dissect games from other users from the Scratch community to learn and add code to your own games. You can also add your games to the network for others to play and learn from. You will find that imagination and continual refinement is key to the invention and creation process and using Scratch will quickly help users to think around problems and tinker around the edges for solutions. The last site is called X-Ray Goggles (formally Hackasaurus) and it has been developed by the same community as the FireFox Web browser. This wonderful tool allows you to make changes to the HTML coding, the programming language which most of the web is build from, to copy, edit and publish modified websites. You can easily add or delete images and rewrite the copy to add or delete text and much more. Just drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar and click to access the code from the site to edit. Once finished, you can publish the modified site and share the link with others. Also see https://www.codehunt.com, a fun code cracking programming web game, and http://www.codecademy.com for a superb interactive online programming course. Coding is becoming a vital skill to have in many of today’s jobs and workplaces and this is only going to increase – see http://code.org for the hard numbers. Like any creative language or design endeavour, it takes time, perseverance and imagination to hone. But it is also a lot of fun and children love to see their creations come to life. Create something amazing today.
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