BLOG OF THE WEEK (12/8/14)

The Day the Video Game Designer Came
Today, I had a really good time at Techie Club! A professional video game designer came in to talk to us about video game designing. He had made video games based on movies, like his Alvin and the Chipmunks video game, and the Tale of Despereaux video game that he had made. He also showed us a short video that he talked about — it was about a boy, Caleb, who had diabetes. The video game designer explained that some people with diabetes have to poke a needle in their finger to get a drop of blood on it, then put it on a special device (I have momentarily forgotten its name, but it ends in “meter!”), and it tells the person that has diabetes how much sugar is in their blood. The video game designer said that the person with diabetes had to do this four times a day. Anyways, the video game designer had made a video game program to distract the person that has diabetes. I thought it was nice of him to care about the people around him.
After we listened to the video game designer, we were divided into groups and each group got a piece of paper and wrote down a verb and a noun. My group wrote, “Thinking Kittens,” and we had to have a genre, platform, target audience, a sentence describing it, 3 game mechanics, and a paragraph explaining the game idea overall. This was a plan for a game. We did this very quickly, and it was hard sometimes for our group to come up with ideas. However, it was fun, and now I know how to brainstorm ideas for video games!
(cbsrek141, 10 December 2014)

BLOG OF THE WEEK (12/1/14)

HOLY SMACKNUGGETS, IT’S OVER 9000!!!
Dear Bros,
Today I customized a computer, and the cost was, ummmmm, lemme check, ummmmm, ummmm, OVER 9000!!!(pesos) It had everything inside including a magic elf (100 pesos each). Then we took apart an old computer, and learned Moore’s Law: A computer’s speed doubles after 2 years. We learned about hardware and software, floppy discs, and RAM. Peace out bros, baii!
(cbssxg141, 03 December 2014)

Computer Inspection
Today in techie club, we looked inside some computers. We got to see the motherboard, CPU, power source, solid-state drive, and a whole lot of other important parts of the computer. We found out that spinning hard drives are now being replaced by solid-state drives, which don’t spin so if you knock over your computer while using it, it won’t lose any memory. It is amazing how many different parts of the computer there are and how they are all important.
(cbsmic141, 03 December 2014)

Scratch
Today in techie club we started programming on Scratch. It was fun. There was so much stuff to do. First they walked us through. We had to change the backdrop to spotlight stage. We had to get a sprite and it had to be the first letter of our first name. We made it turn 15 degrees forever so that it was just spinning in circles. Then, we had to make it so that it changed color by 25. We then got two more sprites, the first letter of our middle name and the first letter of our last name. We dragged the commands over to those two so that they did the same thing. Then, we had to figure out how to make one go slower and one go faster. We had to change how far it turned. If I made it turn 10 degrees it looked like it went slower. With 100 degrees it looked like it went faster.
Then, we got to do what we wanted. I tried to make a parrot fly in space but it was really hard. I also made a girl dance but that wasn’t very hard. to make the girl dance all I had to do was make it so that it started when I clicked the flag. Then I had to change it from costume a to costume b forever with one second between every change. I have a little bit of experience with Scratch so I already knew how to do a lot of the stuff, but I did learn a few new things.
(cbstte141, 03 December 2014)

First Day of Robotics
Today (finally) we did robotics, which I found out the word ‘robot’ was made by a play director. Today we made a car and a top spinner, which took up all of our time.
(cbsgxf141, 03 December 2014)