Summer Job...

I got a job teaching little kids at a summer camp. It is quite refreshing and pleasant. I am teaching classes on "Video Game Programming", Animation, and Comic Book art. It is my first experience with teaching and I am finding that I rather enjoy it. The programs we are using are open source, which is great because they are free, so the kids can download them on their home computers as well. For animation we are using a program called Pencil. It is a lot simpler than Adobe Flash and I think it will be easy for the kids to pick up. I am also really excited about the application we are using to make games. It is called Scratch. It is wonderful for children [and adults like me] because it is what is called "Visual Programming"... That is to say, as opposed to writing long lines of script to make codes for your game, you just snap together color coded lego blocks that represent the scripts. I am terrible at programming but I was still able to learn how to program games and teach a class about it with literally a day or two to prepare myself. I have tried programming games in Flash before and it is very difficult for me. Flash's programming language is called action script, and I try to use it as little as possible, because I am bad at it, haha. It is so easy to learn because you can download other peoples projects from the scratch website and see how they put together their code to make their finished projects. You can also use scratch to do other things like, animations, simulations, interactive art, and more. Although it is difficult to make very professional looking games with Scratch, I think it is still a very valuable learning tool for anyone who is interested in learning some basic principles about programming. Perhaps in the next few weeks, if I get around to posting my Scratch games on my website, I will update this blog with a link to them, so the lone one or two readers I have can play them.