For three weeks this summer, Advantage Technology participated in the BridgeValley CTC STEAM Academy located in the Toyota Hall building of the South Charleston campus. This week-long day camp aims to teach Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math concepts to rising 5th – 8th graders from all around West Virginia. Advantage Technology has instructed the game-design class for the past three years, and hopefully many more to come!
The game-design class is based upon Construct 2 by SCIRRA. Construct 2 is a free program built for 2D game creation and appeals to beginners with its user-friendly drag-and-drop functionality. This program is great for teaching programming fundamentals like conditional logic, instance variables and object orientation.
Game creation gives students a project-based introduction to programming as well as allowing them to be artistically expressive, and so most students are completely engaged throughout the entire week. Most students chose to make a 2D platformer similar to Super Mario where they created a player, collectables, enemies and many levels. Nearing the end of the week, most kids begin sharing their games and letting others play to try and beat them.
