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Posts from the ‘Education’ Category

26
May

Space Battle Arena v1.0.1

Screenshot

King of the Bubble

Just over 3 years ago Space Battle Arena was born.  What started as a crazy idea being built on-the-fly has turned into a whole platform for a series of Programming Games.  It has come a long way over the past year especially, and we are proud to be in a state where we can publish stable builds.

Space Battle Arena has its own website now (available here).  It is the main resource for all materials related to Space Battle including the latest client and server builds, client java docs, student and teacher resources, as well as information about developing for Space Battle.

The project has also now been open sourced on GitHub and will continue to be updated.  If you run into any issues or have suggestions, please file Issues for Space Battle there.  Note: that the main development cycle for Space Battle is between April – June.

In the meantime v1.1 a.k.a. the “Discovery Quest” update is already in the works for ‘Season 4’ at Issaquah High School this year.  For the most up-to-date news, follow us on Twitter @MikewareXGR.

27
Aug

You Have Died of Dysentery: Games in Education are Still Alive

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:

In the early nineties, traditional educational games such as Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail pioneered the way for learning to be fun (and taught us that you can only carry 200 pounds of meat back to your wagon). Since then, the educational games market has not borne the same success as today’s major game franchises. However, it is possible for ‘traditional’ games not specifically designed to be educational to have curricular value. We will show how we have used a wide range of games and game concepts to provide a familiar context for students to engage with new material and principles of Computer Science.  In addition, we will discuss how game professionals can find a place for their games in the classroom.

Presentation Slides and Notes

11
Jun

Space Battle 2014 Final Tournament

Space Battle 2014 was a success.  More details will follow on this post in the near future.

Be on the lookout for updated classroom materials in the coming month at http://battlearena.mikeware.com/.

And if you’re coming to PAX Dev, be sure to check out our talk this year: You Have Died of Dysentery: Games in Education Are Still Alive.

11
Sep

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

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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11
Jun

Space Battle 2: Bauble Hunt SCV


You may remember our video from last year Ships in Space. We continued our foray in space this year and upped the ante.

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.

We also had the opportunity to add weapons and shields to the mix, which created a whole other set of strategies as destroyed ships would drop their Bauble payload.

Above is a video of a final round of one of the classes which came down to a matter of seconds. It was quite exciting!

21
Apr

‘Pellet-Man’ in GridWorld Materials

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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7
Mar

‘Pellet-Man’ in GridWorld

pelletmangridworldscreenshot
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.

In this year’s class, we’re providing a ‘Pellet-Man’ framework to aid student’s learning about inheritance in computer science. If you are an educator and this is of interest to you in your class, please contact us for more information.

2
Sep

Reach for the Stars: Educating the Next Generation Using Games

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…

Reach for the Stars Presentation

14
Jun

Ships in Space


Over the course of the past couple of months, I helped out at my local high school and my fellow teaching friend in a project for his AP Computer Science class. We had students create autonomous robots which had to navigate a space simulation and collect Baubles while avoiding obstacles. It’s important to note that students wrote the logic for the ships and were completely hands-off for the duration of the tournament.

The video clip shows a round from our final tournament. The server was written using Python and PyGame.

5
Jun

Impossible Figures

Impossible Figure Creator

Well, it’s been a while since posting any news.  I’ll have an entry about that later.

Good news is amongst teaching and taking classes, some things get done.  Of course it helps when part of that is because it’s a project for class.  As in this case, the Impossible Figure Creator was born.

It’s the final project in my Visual Communication class which wraps up my graduate certificate in User Centered Design.

Try it out, create a masterpiece and save it for the world to see.