Website and Summer Program Teaching Middle School Children to Develop Video Games on a Skyscraper
www.skyscrapergames.com
| Date: | September 2015 – June 2017 |
| Description: | Skyscraper Games is a multifaceted project from the Entrepreneurial Game Studio (EGS. Skyscrapergames.com is a website meant to teach kids how to code by using a real world programming language (Python). It teaches programming through basic game development principles applied to a game engine that plays games on the side of the Cira centre skyscraper in Philadelphia (The World’s Larget Video Game, see video below). The website is also the basis for a series of programs teaching youth populations of Philly how to code. |
| Responsibilities: | Lead developer of the website, skyscrapergames.com. This involved taking the cira centre game engine previously developed and adapting it to work built in on a browser. In addition to the game engine and website itself, it also included building a user system that could save users code for review in research purposes.
I also helped build and teach the curriculum used to teach middle school kids. I taught this curriculum both for research in the EGS as well as through the Young Dragons program–a collaboration between the Excite Center, EGS, and the Malcolm Jenkins foundation. I also updated the game engine as need be for a few new features for better teaching Python. |
| Tech Stuff: | Skyscrapergames was built with the full MEAN stack.
Client side python was implemented using Skulpt (http://www.skulpt.org/). Skulpt was extended to support the Cira Centre Game Engine previously developed in EGS. Updating the game engine involved expanding the Python game engine library and creating hooks in the website’s JavaScript to run properly in the browser. |
| Date: | September 2015 – June 2017 |
| Description: | Skyscraper Games is a multifaceted project from the Entrepreneurial Game Studio (EGS. Skyscrapergames.com is a website meant to teach kids how to code by using a real world programming language (Python). It teaches programming through basic game development principles applied to a game engine that plays games on the side of the Cira centre skyscraper in Philadelphia (The World’s Larget Video Game, see video below). The website is also the basis for a series of programs teaching youth populations of Philly how to code. |
| Responsibilities: | Lead developer of the website, skyscrapergames.com. This involved taking the cira centre game engine previously developed and adapting it to work built in on a browser. In addition to the game engine and website itself, it also included building a user system that could save users code for review in research purposes.
I also helped build and teach the curriculum used to teach middle school kids. I taught this curriculum both for research in the EGS as well as through the Young Dragons program–a collaboration between the Excite Center, EGS, and the Malcolm Jenkins foundation. |
| Tech Stuff: | Skyscrapergames was built with the full MEAN stack.
Client side python was implemented using Skulpt (http://www.skulpt.org/) |