Posts from the Education Section
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26May
Space Battle Arena v1.0.1
[caption id="attachment_333" align="alignright" width="300"]
King of the Bubble[/caption] -
Michael A. Hawker and Brett Wortzman presented this talk at PAXDev 2014 about how non-educational games can have educational value in the classroom. Synopsis:
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Space Battle 2014 was a success. More details will follow on this post in the near future.
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11Sep
Space Battle Arena Materials
You may have seen our 'Ships in Space' videos before. We're happy to finally release the materials for Space Battle Arena v0.9.
Space Battle Arena is a 'Programming Game' where students must write code (in Java) to control a space ship to accomplish specified tasks. We have performed this project and its challenge two years running now with great success. Students have been enthusiastic, excited, and engaged with learning to control a ship in a physical environment and comparing strategies against their fellow students in a fun competition.
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Once again students were tasked with creating their own autonomous space ships which could navigate the harsh physics of space on their own without their programmer's interaction. However, unlike last year where they simply had to collect Baubles to score points, this year, they had to bring the Baubles back to their home base before points would be scored.
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As mentioned previously, we recreated a classic arcade game in the Advanced Placement Computer Science case study GridWorld.
GridWorld involves programming 'Actors' within a grid system. This was a natural fit for 'Pellet-Man' and is a good exercise for students to work on something exciting and challenging while reinforcing their new knowledge of inheritance and practice using the system found on their AP exam.
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GridWorld is the Advanced Placement Computer Science case study acting as a project culminating the knowledge students learn over the course of a school year before taking the AP exam. -
Had a great weekend at PAX and PAXDev! As you may know, at PAXDev we gave a talk on our space simulation project given after the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam this year at Issaquah High School. It was requested that we post the slides to our talk. So without further ado...
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14Jun
Ships in Space
The video clip shows a round from our final tournament. The server was written using Python and PyGame.
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5Jun
Impossible Figures
Well, it's been a while since posting any news. I'll have an entry about that later.
