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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.