Coding Confidence: Adams students design video games from computer class lessons

December 9, 2024

Adams Elementary School students created the keywords of “fun,” “happy” and “exciting” this fall with their newfound computer coding knowledge.
 
Fourth graders in Mary Abebe’s computer classes built their own video games through innovative design lessons. They learned how to write computer code for items such as falling pizzas, happy kittens and gem-gathering characters during the semester. They then tested each other’s designs and helped them fix glitches in their algorithms, scripts and variables.

 
Emma and Braden worked together to create a game that contained almost two pages of computer code. In their game, a chicken tries to collect point-scoring gems while hopping from platform to platform. Players who gather all three gems on the first level advance to the game’s final stage, where there are another three gems to pick up.
 
At the same time, the chicken characters must avoid running into pizzas that are falling from the sky. Players win the game if they dodge all of the pizzas and reach 15 points by the end of Level 2.
 
Emma said if she could rate her level of game-coding fun on a scale of one to ten, it would be “a 100.”
 
“I want to do this every day in class,” Emma said.
 
Braden said it was exciting to get feedback on their game from their classmates. Students gathered in teams of two or three to review each creation in early December. They could look at each game’s code, examine its storyline and make suggestions if something wasn’t working on the screen.
 
“It’s really fun to have them be able to see our game and how we built it,” Braden said.
 
Caitlin Provance is coordinator of the K-5 computer science curriculum at Lincoln Public Schools. LPS uses material from an educational nonprofit called Code.Org as the foundation for its elementary coursework. The lessons teach children many important skills that they can use in other school subjects.
 
“With this being such an engaging unit of study, students often don’t realize they are learning some pretty challenging concepts,” Provance said. “In addition to applying their knowledge from computer science, students are utilizing their experiences from the classroom such as math skills and storytelling to create their video games. Video game design helps to strengthen the skills of problem-solving, creativity, perseverance and collaboration.”

 
Code.Org released a video game design unit for fourth graders for the first time this year. Emma, Braden and their classmates began having some exposure to video game design in first grade, but this was the most demanding coding platform they had encountered.
 
“We use Code.Org all the time because it’s our main curriculum that we work from, but they’ve never had to create a game in Code.Org, and it’s a little bit different from the other apps that we use,” Abebe said. “For their first time, they did a great job.”
 
Lanie and Rozie said they were happy to have successfully worked through all of the coding challenges. They built a game called “Rainbow Madness” that featured a kitten as the main character. Players who used the kitten to collect four rainbows were rewarded with a happy bubble image.
 
“We’ve coded a different game (before), but it wasn’t as hard as this,” Rozie said.
 
“Sometimes we would get everything, and then we would want to add a new thing, and it would mess up something else,” Lanie said. “We just had to make mistakes and try new things.”

 
Ruby and Aubrey also based their game on kittens. They called it “Kitty Escape” and asked players to rescue every kitten within seven seconds. Players also had to avoid other animals during their adventures.
 
“One of my favorite things about this game is that we could say it was raining cats and dogs,” Ruby said.
 
Aubrey said she and Ruby felt a sense of accomplishment from the design process. They learned about the behaviors of characters and objects, how to animate them and how to make them interactive in their games. They also discovered how to program and modify the code so data would change based on player interaction.
 
“I was telling her how crazy it was that we went from a square background to an entire video game in just a couple of days,” Aubrey said.
 
Students also strengthened skills such as unity and empathy in the class. Oliver alerted Abebe about a coding glitch that appeared in his team’s game, and she asked the other fourth graders to inspect the code from their laptops. Everyone dropped what they were doing and came together for a solution.
 
“It makes me feel special that everybody is taking their own time to work on a game that we needed help with,” Oliver said. “I worked on Sunday at home to do this to try and get this to work so it could be ready, and something that we were working on must have gone wrong, and everybody here helped us. I really liked that.”
 
“I love how they work together,” Abebe said. “That’s my favorite thing.”
 
Teammates Parker and Ethan said experiencing those keywords of “cooperation” and “helpfulness” made the video game process a winning part of their school day.
 
“It was good,” Parker said. “I liked it. It was fun.”

Want to try a few of the students' games? Click the links below to play. 

Super Pizza Chicken

Don't Eat the Broccoli

Rainbow Madness

 

To learn more about our computer science curriculum, visit our Career and Technical Education page at https://home.lps.org/cte/cs/. 

 
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