Game Studio Workshop for our Hungarian visitors

On Wednesday 18.2.2015 our Hungarian guests at Ii Upper Secondary School participated in a workshop concerning computer science. The theme of the workshop was Hour of Code, gaming and developing games in general. The workshop organizer, maths and ICT teacher, Jukka Ervasti had given a game developing course on Scratch for students in Ii Upper Secondary School and now the students from the course were there to help our foreign guests with the tasks at the workshop.

The workshop started with Hour of Code. First, one of the guests, a girl called Gabriella, told that she wasn’t into ICT or computer science. After a short introduction and encouragement, she began to take part. In the end, she was the first one to complete the Certificate of Completion of the Hour of Code. I think we got into the bottom of the subject at hand, that is, the global campaign concerning children of all ages to get to know computer science and programming. A little later, other students got the Certificate too, also the host students received the Certificate. In addition, the Hungarian teacher Judit managed to solve the 20 puzzles and finally got a Certificate of her own.

After the Hour of Code, Ii Upper Secondary School students Konsta, Antti, Samuli and Miikka showed the games they had created with Scratch on their game programming course.The games seemed to be interesting based upon the amount of laughter being heard all over the computer science classroom. There were maze games, platformers, shooter games and puzzle games to play. Therefore, many different game types were introduced and the students from Ii told how they were made.

The last task was to make a small game or short interactive media with Scratch. In the assisting hands of our students, the Hungarian guests managed to make two music videos including moving objects like cars driving around and youngsters dancing with a very catchy Hungarian song playing in the background. Everybody seemed to enjoy the workshop and had fun.

I hope the workshop gave some new ideas and ways to think about computer science and programming in general. Judit, the English teacher from Hungary, had the intention to tell about the campaign to her colleagues in Hungary.