Creative Computing Club: Week 3 Processing

Today was hard work for the students but they coped well, not only did they have to learn Processing but all the terminology and concepts that goes along with computer programming. I admit I threw them in at the deep end, but they all managed to swim. The problems they were having were minor syntax errors; a missing semi-colon, a missing ")" not problems with the big concepts. They were able to take on board variables, arrays and even 2D arrays, it is quite easy when you put it in context of a game. A variable could be the Health Points or HP, an array could be used for the heroes inventory and a maze could be done using a 2D array. We even covered conditionals, functions and for loops.

I didn't want them to understand everything I just wanted to give them an overview of computer programming, these things like all crafts take time. I did however want to have a complete program or in this case a very small simple game, that way they could go home and have the whole program to tinker with. Because we did the Game Maker session first there were a lot of similarities to draw on, like variables and screen layouts.

I think it was a success, the proof of that however will come next week when I find what else they have gone on to do with Processing, like how they came back this week with Game Maker games with loads of cool features. This is just meant to be an introduction, the rest will be up to them. The book I recommended the look at to follow up the session with was "Getting Started with Processing A Quick, Hands-on Introduction"by Casey Reas and Ben Fry here.

Sadly today I was super busy running around making sure people were up to speed so I didn't get a chance to make any photos of the session today, but I promise I will next week when we start to play with the Arduinos.

We made a 2D maze game and so can you by downloading all the resources from the resource page here.