Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Epic Mickey





I think that this game would be hard to make because of all the effects it has. But even though it's hard work it would be worth it because a game like that, with a lot of magic, special effects, it will draw in a lot of money. It has really good graphics it's not hard to see it clearly.





Source:bscreview.com

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Juan Z 13 2010

"Strange Days on Planet Earth"


In this confusing era only on thin thing is certain, that we are living very strange days

plants and animals are n places that they don't belong

they're spreading disease, they are destroying our landmasses and each year it gets worse.

A lot of us are fueling traffic unwillingly every day and we're introducing new aliens.

Alien - something that is somewhere where it doesn't belong

Homeowners have lost their property because of a huge pack of animals

Insects are small but when they are in a group they can become a massive force.

The city of New Orleans is filled with termites and New Orleans is even made out of termite food, many people have already complained about it but there is nothing that they can do.

Termites are not only in New Orleans they can be anywhere.
At least 7,000 species are in motion at any given time. Which means they can be moving to a different ocean any different environment.
Big animal sometimes transported smaller animals or seeds.
Many scientists believe that if all continents unite there can be a lot less species because we won't be able to support them as much as we can with seven separated continents.
We have raised the temperature one degree more in the last century
60,00 species have vanished.
Twice a year caribou migrate through the porcupine river and when they get to the village all the people get excited.
The climate is changing so fast that the elders are worrying that the species will not adapt quick enough because these elders are not use to this now climate change is occurring very quickly.
The animals go to the top of the hill now they don't get bit by the mosquitoes.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Team Members and Topic

J-Force
Team Members:
Juan Z.
Jonathan H.
Jonathan R.
Jacinto C.
Topic - Our Topic is Global Warming because it's a very important issue in our world and it's always all over the news. Our goal is to encourage people to start caring for the world and stop causing Global Warming. The Aztec Calendar says that the world will end on 12.21.12, and if we don't get the word out there to care for the environment, it will. We hope that this will encourage more people to do this.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Juan Z 12 2010

Temperatures have never been so hot
Global Warming causes very strong storms because it causes more water to evaporate
Anything that is man-made is derived from oil, basically we use oil everyday!
People in Nigeria are dying because of the corrupt government in their country.
There are oils rigs in Nigeria and it pollutes their drinking water.
Shell was going to build a medical center in Nigeria and they have not finished because they're "worried about kidnapping".
The oil spills there kill fish so the oil pollutes the water which they now can't drink and it kills the fish so now they can't eat.
Oil has become the main source worth fighting for.
Why did the USA go to war with Iraq? O-i-l
People protested against the windmill farms because it ruins their view and they don't like the way they look.
Oil companies think that they are doing well to care for the environment.
People in France made a team to say NO to trucks and stop all this pointless transportation.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Juan Z 11 2010

My topic is on Global Warming and here are some links that I thought could help me.

1.) Global Warming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

2.) Greenhouse Gas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

3.) Climate Change http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

These all will give you information about my topic for Global Warming.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Juan Z. 10 2010

Source 1

Cooler Heads Coalition http://www.globalwarming.org/ ©2010
Found on 10/11/10


Source 2

Global Warming
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html
©2010
Found on 10/11/10


Source 3

Climate Change
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/
Last updated on October 1, 2010
Date found: 10/11/10


Source 4

Global Warming
http://www.nwf.org/Global-Warming.aspx
©1996-2010
Date found: 10/11/10

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Juan Z. 9 2010

How to Properly Cite Internet Resources
Use the format below to add Internet resources to a bibliography.
Author. Title of Website. Web address or URL. Copyright date. Date you found the information.
Example:
Previous FIFA World Cups.
Copyright: 1994-2010
Found October 7, 2010

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Juan Z. 1 2010

I got this picture about a Global Cluster from nasa.gov. I don't really know what it is but I just think it looks really cool. As you can see at the bottom of the red one it says VIS and on the bottom if the blue it says UV. I stil don't know what that means.

Juan Z. 8 2010

Yesterday in class we saw a movie that talked about coral reefs. The movie talked about coral reefs and how they are endangered. It had a group of people who were traveling to different coral reefs in the world. Coral reefs are found in the water and it is the home to many fish and plants. This is why it is very important to protect these coral reefs. If we stop caring and start damaging these coral reefs would just be a huge open space of land. The people in this movie think that these coral reefs could be endangered because of overfishing. Which means that if we could fish less we could stop damaging these coral reefs. I'm not saying that we should stop fishing but just fish less because that's how we are losing our fish living in the coral reefs. And not only are coral reefs beneficial to the fish and plants, but they are also beneficial to us. They are a lot like the rainforest this is also where we can also get our medicines from the coral reefs. So if these coral reefs are beneficial to us why shouldn't we care for it? Another way we can stop harming it is by not dumping stuff in the water anymore. Toxic waste kills the animals and kils the plants and it kills the whole coral reef. And as I say if we have no more coral reefs it will not be good for anybody. It kills the plants and kills all the other organisms and could also harm us.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Juan Z. 7 2010

Today we watched Planet Earth: The Future Saving Species and we learned about the species in the world that our endangered. The reason why we need the species is because if we lose their entire population that reduces the stability of their habitats. Up in the arctic the polar bears are losing their ice caps. We saw one polar bear that had a really rare behavior. He was swimming through the arctic and went to an ice cap full of walruses and was trying to fight them because he couldn't find any other food. In one interview one man said that the we have lost at least half of the world's population of frogs, including the rare, Golden Toad. We learned in the video about something called poaching. Poaching is when you get rid of something. Like these animals that are being poached. What I learned from this video is that humans could probably be the cause of these species being very close to going extinct. Many humans kill animals such as, Elephants for the ivory in their tusks, or Tigers to use their fur and make coats. But we can all make this stop and we can stop poaching half of the world's population of animals. If we kill only one species than a lot of other species will die too. If we kill, for example, the whole population of rats then snakes don't have any food and then birds don't have any food and we keep killing and killing animals. I learned a lot from this video and I'm glad about it.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Juan Z. 6 2010

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse
My final 2 topics are, child sexual abuse and teenage suicide. First of all child sexual abuse is very common and it's not a pretty thing to hear about. I don't want anybody to be abused I can't even imagine the horror they must be going through. Also I like watching Law & Order: SVU and it talks a lot about sexual abuse and it gets me really interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_suicide
And teenage suicide. Because a lot of teenagers think that just because they have a lot of problems they're not going to go away just by killing yourself. Think about your family and your friends. Suicide is not the answer. In fact, you might unsuccessfully commit suicide and you might get sent to jail because suicide is illegal. So I think this could also be an interesting topic.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Juan Z 5 2010

Possible Topics
http://www.whatkidscando.org/ - This website shows me all kinds of Social Issues we have in this world. So that could be a good website to use as a reference.
http://www.freethechildren.com/ - I like this website a lot because these days you see a lot of kids in poverty. Some kids don't get the same stuff we do. I chose it because it's about kids just like me.
http://www.interaction.org/ - This website is about people coming together to make the world a better place. I agree because this world is not such a good place. But if we come all together, then we can.
http://www.globalgang.org.uk/ - This website is made by kids to support world crisis. Such as, floodings, earthquakes, poverty, hunger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse - This is a possible reference because a lot of kids get sexually abused really often.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_suicide - I know how a lot of teenagers always think that they have so many problems so they commit suicide. That's why I think it's interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_Weed#Joint - This website is interesting to me because a lot of kids start smoking when they are barely in middle school and not only does it harm them but us too because smoking weed causes pollution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_people - This website is a possible topic because homelessness can always start at an early age. Plus, there is a really famous street person who lives in Austin.
http://kids.yahoo.com/directory/Around-the-World/Social-and-Political-Issues
This website led me to all the other websites above.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Juan Z. 3 2010

1.) I think that the documentary was very sad but it was the truth. Humans all cause Global Warming. Some people might be doing it on accident or just to be funny but either way it's wrong. I like how the documentary was very informative and I liked how Al Gore talked only about the truth.

2.) I think Global Warming is a serious issue and we have the ability to stop it but we, as humans, are not taking the advantage of it.

3.) The information makes me feel really guilty because I feel like I'm not doing anything to help the environment. I have to start dong everything I can to help the world.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Juan Z. 4 2010

Image retrieved from wallpapers.androlib.com

This picture is about my favorite soccer player Javier Hernandez. The reason why I like him is because he is like the best current Mexican soccer player. He is so good that he plays for one of the best teams in the world. I like this picture how it says right next to him "Birth of a Hero". By that I think it means that his future is going to be very bright because he's only 22 he's just getting started.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Globaloria

Globaloria is my 3rd period class. It's a class where we are learning to make our own games. We work in the computer lab and we're put into groups to make our games. Our group has to make a game the includes TAKS Objective 3 (Geometry & Spatial Reasoning). Our game is about recycling in order to persuade players to recycle. We want people to recycle because we want them to save the environment. But at the same time we want to teach people about geometry. Such as, shapes,angles, and graphing. So we work in Flash where we learn what to do for when we have to do our games. Such as adding animation and navigation. We've also created a Mini Game Project. At the beginning of the year I thought this was going to be any other regular typing class. Now it turns out that it's better.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Adding Navigation

It Lately we've been working on the Adding Navigation tab of the wiki. It was really hard because when we would get on Flash and type in the codes and it wouldn't work. I got so frustrated because we saw so many tutorials about it, we would do exactly what they were doing and it wouldn't come out right. That's what I hate about working in Flash because you follow all of the directions carefully but Flash says that it's wrong. Like today when we were working on demo 3. We were watching the tutorial and we did exactly what they did on the tutorial but Flash said that there were two errors. And we would go to the errors and it was the same thing that was on the tutorial but they didn't have any errors. That's what I hated about working in Flash. This a video that I chose to write about. Because it gives you an idea of what we were doing in class. It's a tutorial about adding navigation on Flash.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Flash


Now we're working in FLASH again. One thing that's hard for me when it comes to FLASH is when I create a button or anything sometimes it doesn't come out right. Or maybe sometimes it doesn't come out at all. And it gets frustrating when you follow all of the directions correctly, over and over again, and it still doesn't come out right. I think that if the teacher did it first maybe it will be a little better because then the class can actually see how it's done. I think it's important to remember the coding process in FLASH because that's how most of it works. And if you don't remember the coding process then whatever you're doing will not turn out right. To become a FLASH EXPERT I have to listen carefully of how FLASH works. If I listen carefully I can understand how it's done and I will become a FLASH EXPERT. When we are working in class the distractions really do their job of distracting. I can get really easily distracted by almost anything. To try to stop distractions I think that we should save the questions until the end of the discussion. Because if we have questions during the discussion then we will all have other questions and not get any further into the lesson. I think that the videos we watch that Globaloria made are helpful because they show us what to do and it makes it easier for us. I think I can help myself to understand FLASH better by listening and paying attention. That way I will know what to do and how it's done. I think that FLASH will help me a lot in the future because then it will be easier to make our game and maybe we might have a chance to go to D.C.!


Thursday, March 11, 2010

03/10/10

Yesterday we had a visit from Shannon Sullivan as our guest teacher for Technology class. So what she made us do was go on to wiki and look at the Sandy River Middle School wiki and look at their team pages. My team looked at the Frosted Loops page and took notes about their game. Their game was kind of like Pacman only with questions about fractions, it was called Fracman. The way to win was by getting points by controling Fracman to eat all of the "Fracdots" and avoid being eaten by the "Fracghosts". So the team is teaching kids about fractions and they're making it because elementary kids usually have trouble with fractions. This is how the game works. For each level they ask you a question about fractions and there's some fractions around the stage and you have to go through the right answer to pass on to the next stage. If you go through the wrong answer you will be removed temporarily from the stage and they will ask you three questions and you must get them right to get back in. After we studied their game we made a presentation about our notes.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Team Progress

Now I will be writing about our team progress. I think our team has been getting along really well. Because whenever we have an assignment to do we do it. We always mostly agree on our decisions, and we respect our leader. So whenever our team leader tells us to do something we do it no matter what. Our team is called Tech Tigers, because it's tech class and we're the tigers, and we're making a game about recycling to show the importance of recycling. My assignment was to draw out level 1 on Flash and it's about 90% completed. So I'm almost done but it takes a while to complete. I hope this becomes a successful game because our goal is to teach people the importance of recycling and how bad polluting can be for the environment. I think our gropup game is just as good as my individual game. I thought that my individual game was pretty good because gangs and violence are also a big problem here in East Austin. So we're getting closer to completing drawing our game in Flash. I want to get it done soon so we can publish them. I hope we also get to add animation pretty soon too. I bet that will be realy cool too. So that's how are team progress has been so far.

Drawing in Flash


This week in Globaloria we have started drawing in Flash. I have learned how to draw anything in Flash. And by any thing I mean anything. You can type, wuou can draw, you can make straight lines, squares, ovals etc. I learned how to use different tools such as the text tool, pencil tool and stuff like that. I had to draw level 1 of our team game. Which was the school. I learned how to draw squares to make the school and type inside it and make grass by using the brush tool to paint the bottom of the page green, and painting the top blue to make the sky. I used the square and oval tools to make the soda cans, I used the square tool to make paper, and the pencil to draw candy rappers. I thought that maybe drawing in Flash would be a little hard but it turned out to be really easy because it had all the tools there for you. After I was done drawing level 1 I looked at it and it didn't look so bad, it didn't look perfect, it was okay. After I was done I was so tired but it was mission accomplished I drew level 1 so we were one step closer to finishing drawing our game, Recycle Man. I just hope that those people in New York make us do it again like the other time they asked us to do the Mini Game Project again.

Monday, February 22, 2010

This Week

This week in Globaloria we've been working on paper prototypes. We had to do another paper prototype and present it to our class on Friday. So my team, the Tech Tigers, we improved our game by adding coordinates. Where for every piece of trash that you pick up you must tell what two coordinates it's located at. So we made it on graph paper and added the coordiantes. We also added a mini game as a warm up for our real game. Where you use the arrow keys to move a recycle can. Trash keeps on faling down from the sky and you have to catch it. As you keep on going the trash keeps coming faster and faster. I enjoyed working with my teammates because whenever I get stuck they help me and because when you do things individually it's kind of hard but as a team you get help and that's why I liked to work as a team. When it was time to present our paper prototypes it got kind of hard and you might forget what you have to say. But you have to memorize it because you're not only presenting to your class but they're also recording you, and that's where it gets hard. I understand how we put our objective no. 3 in our game. We put geometry with different extra credit questions about shapes. And spatial reasoning by trying to find out what coordinates a piece of trash is at.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Flash Designer


In my team I was the Flash designer. I really didn't have many responsibilities because we didn't work with Flash. I guess you can't really say if I was good or bad because I really didn't have any work to do, since we didn't work with Flash. I agreed with most of the things my teammates said because they had some pretty good ideas and I have a lot of confidence that our game will be succesful. I look most forward to winning the competition and going to Washington D.C. And I want it to becoming a really cool game that everybody wants to play. Our inspiration was the trash tat people throw everywhere. Because we've seen everywhere people throwing trash wherever they feel like it. So we wanted this to stop and create a game to show that the world would be a better place if everyone recycled. So I liked my job in my team. We also want people to learn math objective 3 (geometry and spatial reasoning).

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Paper Prototype

This week we have gotten in groups to create our own game. We created a game called recycle man. It's about you playing as a recycle man going through all the city and picking up trash. We made a paper prototype to plan what it will look like. It was pretty cool because it was like a real game only that instead of being on the computer it was on paper. I enjoyed it becuase I was drawing out my own game and by the time I presented it it looked like a real game. When we presented it our group was the first one to go up there. It showed exactly like it wanted it to. At the beginning it said the title, Recycle Man. We touched where it said instructions and we presented what the instructions were and the controls to play. We touched the arrow that would take us back and play the game, but on paper. It was level 1 in the school. I was presenting it and I moved the recycle man to pick up trash (eg. soda cans, papers, plastic bottles etc.). Whenever you picked something up you would get a ceirtan amount of points. It would give you 1 minute to pick up all the trash. If you want to stop playing you press cancel. If you want to come back later each level has a code so that when you come back you can start at that level. It continued the same in level 2 in the park, and level 3 in the creek you will have less time to pick up the trash. That was our game. I liked working in a group because we all shared our ideas of what the game should be like.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Awesome Blog


I'm making the best blog that I ever made. I will be writing about my Globaloria class from beginning to end. So on the first day we heard that later in the year we will be making our own games. But we had to go step by step, first we had to make a Gmail to have a Wiki and a blog. So after we made our Gmail we made our Wiki. We made our profile with our avatar we added people to our social profile and stuff like that. We also blogged a lot over the rest of the semester about Globaloria until that point. Our Wiki pages got more and more advanced. We added videos and we played with it a lot like that. We chose a Social Issues topic to make our game about. I chose to make a game about gangs. But first we had to practice by working on the Mini Game Project. I the Mini Game Project we had a carrot and a bunny and we would use codes from the wiki page to make them do stuff. Like first make the carrot appear, the move the carrot to right side of the page, then we made the carrot move by itself to the right side of the page, then we made it move when we used the arrow keys, then put the bunny in and moving up and down with the arrow keys, then make it eat the carrot, and then to score 1 point after he eats it. We did that for one week and then blog about what we felt about that week. We also planned our whole game. In my game you had to show people what the consequences were fro being in gangs. Where it would ask you what coordinates you would go to. The streets, the school, the police station and the last one the Capitol where you have to save the governor. But after all of that Mrs. Miller decided that we will all be in groups correspondent to our objectives. My group decided to make a game about recycling. It's about you playing as a recycle man where you have to pick up as much trash as you can, and that game we hope will teach people to stop throwing trash everywhere. There are 3 levels to that the creek, the school, and the park.That was what has been going on since the beginning of the year in Globaloria. I'm looking forward to learning how to create our game. I want to create our game already and publish it in the Internet. I'm exited about creating my first game because anybody has access to it. Not just us everyone in this world. And just about how many people will play it. Some of the players maybe I don't even know them. That is why I'm excited about it. That's how Globaloria has been.



Monday, January 25, 2010

The Mini Game

Last week we worked with Flash. I really liked Flash because it was so easy and just like that if you test the movie it moves. I don't really think it was hard because the wiki would tell you exactly specifically what to do. All you got to do is just do what it says to do and it comes out right.The best part was how you can move the bunny by using the arrow keys and every time you ate the carrot you would get one point. The worst part was that sometimes it could get really frustrating. Sometimes you would put in the code and everything but nothing would happen. So that's basically what we did last week. And we did everything in this order. First we turned the carrot into a movie clip, then we moved the carrot from left to right, then we made the carrot move across the screen, then we made the bunny move by using the arrow keys, then we made the bunny eat the carrot, and then lastly we put the scoreboard so that every time you eat the carrot you get one point. Then on Friday we got a lesson from a lady that was speaking to us on the phone and we could see her Mini Game Template on the screen. Only the bad thing was that we had to do everything all over again.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

FLASH

The past following days my class has been working with FLASH movie clips and ActionScripting. I like doing that because I can just type in a code and I can make two movie clips move. I find this code on my Wiki page and then I just copy & paste it onto FLASH. Then I Test the movie and just that easy those movie clips just move. That's what I think is really cool about FLASH to do just that and then the movie clip does a lot of stuff. What I think is kind of frustrating about FLASH is that sometimes I type in the codes but it doesnt't work. I try to get hel p from someone or just do the same thing they did but it still doesn't work. But when it does work I really like it. This has been a fun week for me in Technology because we get do some really cool stuff and it's so easy. I think it's even my favorite week here since the beginning of the semester. Every time I come to school I'm just looking forward to come to this class and get on FLASH. I hope this answers your question about how I feel about working FLASH. So I'm just feeling very comfortable doing this thing and I hope to keep on doing it for the rest of the week. That was my blog about FLASH.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

My Game

In my game that I will create it will be about eliminating gang members. So the game will ask you what possible coordinates a gang could be at. If you get it right you advance and if you get it wrong you lose -50 points. It will go through 5 stages the street, a bank robbery, the high school, the police station, and then the boss where you have to save the governor. I'm hoping to persuade teenagers into not committing those mistakes. And also the consequences for being in gangs. I think people should play my game to show teenagers that say that "they're in a gang" and show that being in a gang is not cool. I chose this topic because I know that a lot of teenagers say that "they're in a gang" even though they're really not and show them that it's not cool to be in a gang. When those people play it I hope they stop saying all that stuff.