When a student has the chance to develop their own video game as part of a class assignment, that makes for a special day. That is exactly what a group of eighth-grade students is doing at STEM School Highlands Ranch.
In Simi Basu’s eighth grade class, students are designing their own video games from scratch, starting with an idea, then the coding and development. For STEM eighth-grader Sam Sarkissian, that meant trying out new scenes and improvising.
“I have added in other stuff during the process,” Sarkissian said. “It used to be pirate ships and cannonballs. Now, it’s frogs and ghosts.”
For student Alex Price, the assignment helped him figure out how to overcome obstacles.
“I would say the biggest challenge is, I’m working on getting some music in, so it’s just a little hard with that,” Sarkissian said.
Basu says from start to finish, it is the students who carry out their vision.
“They have some parameters that they have to work with,” Basu said. “The game should be working, objects should be moving and colliding, but they have to do the coding behind that for each and every item to work.”
Basu added that she is extremely impressed with what the students have created up to this point, and is looking into the possibility of getting some of the video games placed onto the app store. To see the full feature story, watch the video below.
