I finished! I am so excited. Thanks so much to Kathleen, Dan, Greg and Donna for getting me started on the right foot this morning. It makes me think and reflect about how important it is to have encouraging teachers on our students’ side. I had such a better attitude about this learning adventure because I was relaxed and felt somewhat confident about completing this task since I had some background knowledge to apply to my new learning.
Day One: I watched the Microworlds videos a few days ago with my stepson Jackson. He actually wanted to watch TV but as soon as he started watching my computer, he quickly left the TV and wanted to do the assignment with me. I love that.
Day Two: After thinking about the original videos, and preparing for our big group meeting, Dan gave the best advice which was to watch the Snacman videos because everything he learned, he just completed after that particular segment of the video. I did the same thing and it was like being a kid again. I spent so many days playing Pacman at Happy Joes pizza in Minot, ND and wasted a lot of allowance on the game in order to get my name on the highest points list. If I would only have known that at 34 years of age I could make my own game with the small price of a Pepperdine tuition, well… :)
The group meeting this morning reminded me of how much I love to learn with others. I love the dialogue, the support, the encouragement, and it seems this is what I need as well as others to start us on the right foot. It really gave em a clear big picture of what the project was all about. After the large group meeting, I took Dan’s advice and watched the tutorials stopping and starting while working in Microworlds at the same time. It was genius and it gave me the small satisfaction to keep working and moving along. Some questions I had while I was creating the snacman costume was why does the size of the snacman change shape when you put him in the up or down direction? Is it the inversion of the x and y axis? Also, I couldn’t seem to make my program copy multiple dots to eat. I could only cut and paste one at a time. I even tried Dan’s trick of using the lasso. Oh well, it all ended up working out in the end.
One huge tip that I learned in a tragic way is that your controls should be in an enclosed area to avoid being eaten by your snacman. It was like watching a car crash! Dan also showed us how to use a keyboard control he snagged off the vocabulary instructions in Microworlds. So cool! That gave me many happy memories of playing on my parents Apple IICE and trying to make Frogger get across the road before the cars would crush him.
Besides the copying of multiple dots, I couldn’t seem to hear the music that I created. I am not sure what is going on. Any suggestions would be great.
Overall, I had a great time completing this adventure. I am so thankful Gary for the tutorials and the time it took for you to complete them to assist us in our learning. It even made me want to paragraph out my response in a nice fashion just for you. And it made my learning an enjoyable experience. I really just relaxed and had fun seeing what I could do. Everyone in my family wants to play the game and I am really anxious to maybe show this to my students. How about a Fahrenheit 451 game with Montag being chased by the Mechanical Hound? And he eats up books for points? Thanks LC and Gary.
I posted my Snacman game on GG as SnacmanAnne
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