Consider phases of game development when planning a programming curriculum unit. This framework provides a learning experience that simulates the real-world. For this reason, divide game development tasks into three phases: pre-production, production, and post-production. Now, it is important to realize that there is little agreement on how many phases are in game development. Some …
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Design thinking careers are everywhere. If you are an educator, it is essential that you prepare students for their future. It is likely their future career may require them to be design thinkers. Design thinking is a model used by organizations when performing creative problem-solving. It has five steps including emphasize, define, ideate, prototype, and …
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Do you need practical tips to create a project-based curriculum unit that follows a design thinking model? This post provides activities for each of the five steps including empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. All ideas are for children and will fit easily into your lesson plans. To start, let’s review the purpose of design …
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When teaching a game development curriculum unit use a Game Development Rubric. A rubric is an efficient way to consistently grade student work. Especially when teaching multiple classes. Moreover, this tool makes it easy to rate students’ performance from beginner to expert. What is a Rubric? To clarify, a rubric is an assessment tool that …
Design thinking is a five-step model for creative problem solving that focuses on understanding people’s needs to develop products, services, policies, or strategies. This process finds solutions that balances what humans desire with what is possible and affordable. Design thinkers work in diverse fields including engineering, architecture, graphic design, game development, advertising, animation, video production, …
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Do you want to freeze a sprite in Scratch when the player hits an obstacle? You can! It is one line of code, with a combination of three blocks. Quickly and easily, you can add this feature to your game. Please note, this solution works best if arrow keys control the player. If your player …
Character rigging animation turns a static object into a character that can move its body parts to create realistic actions such as walk, jump, or wave. In Adobe Animate the Asset Warp Tool uses pins to create joints and bones. These allow a character’s limbs to bend. Follow the step-by-step instructions to use character rigging …
A fun Animate tutorial is to create spinning stars. Follow the instructions to make a movie clip symbol of a star that can be inserted onto the stage many times. To make the symbol you will need to draw a star in the Editing Pane, convert it to a graphic symbol, and then create a …
To teach computer science concepts to kids one option is to sign up for Scratch student accounts. Scratch is an online coding platform designed especially for children. The registration process has only a few steps. Students are asked to provide a nickname, country, gender, and email address. That’s it! However, there are pitfalls. In this …
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Follow the step-by-step instructions to learn how to use the Asset Warp Tool in Adobe Animate. The Asset Warp Tool uses pins to move, twist, or warp an object. Bones can connect pins to form a skeleton. This makes it fun and easy to animate any graphic. Give it a try! This activity is from …
