Game.lab Session 1 - Game.lab Kicks Off!

Tonight we held our first Game.lab metting which is part of Loreto High School's Computer.lab after school club.  Seven very enthusiastic pupils attended: Bijoux, Ethan, Ewa, Anthony, Eleanor, Dorota and Soloman.  After a quick introduction about the Game Maker software we'll be using, the pupils started their learning journey about creating computer games.

We started by talking about the four main things that make up a Game Maker game:

• Sprites or Graphics
• Objects which have Actions and Events
• Rooms or Screens
• Sounds

Each of these items was then demonstrated in turn with the pupils using laptops to create their games. We started by making two sprites, one for a wall and another for a ball.  Game Maker uses a sprite editor which is similar to most Painting programs on computers.

Next the pupils turned the sprites into two separate objects so that they could be given actions and events.  A room was created in which the objects could be placed and the wall object was used to create a wall aorund the whole screen. The ball was then placed in the room.

The pupils all seemed to grasp these main concepts easily after being shown to how to create each of them.  We didn't use any sounds in this session, but that will be first on the agenda for next time.

The end of the Game.lab session came all to soon for the pupils and they all said they'd enjoyed it and were already looking forward to the next session.