Programming 301 - Course Overview
A fast-paced introduction to block programming for beginners in middle school where they create simple interactive programs with a focus on game design.
- GRADES 7-8
- BEGINNER
- WEB
Description
An advanced introduction to programming for middle school. Introduce programming fundamentals to your class as they build two arcade-inspired games from start to finish. The Adventure Game features a knight who has to defeat enemies to reach treasure. Students program arrow keys, fluid motion, hero and enemy behavior, and winning conditions. In Dragon Attack, they define multiple levels and lives, and program a boss enemy, while learning about variables and cloning.
Topics
- Events
- Keyboard and mouse interaction
- Conditional loops
- Nested loops
- Sending and receiving messages
- Fluid motion
- Parallax scrolling
- Local and global variables
- Functions
- Object cloning
What Students Learn
- Build complex multi-level games
- Use variables to keep score
- Use cloning to create actors programmatically
- Build algorithms using complex conditional logic
- Understand parallelism with multiple scripts
- Program different behaviors for different actors
- Publish projects to the Web
- Troubleshoot and debug programs
Technical Requirements
* Online courses require a modern desktop computer, laptop computer, Chromebook, or Netbook with Internet access and a Chrome (29+), Firefox (30+), Safari (7+), or Edge (20+) browser. No downloads required.