This Saturday I visited a secondary school, Södertörns friskola, to be a part of an IT-event. During the day I talked about esports, mathematics and StarCraft 2. Mikael Tylmad and Pontus Walck talked about programming and the students programmed their own games and made game controllers. It was very appreciated and when the event was over almost noone wanted to go so we ended up staying and play games for another hour or so.

The event was for girls only. At the school there is a computer club (how cool is that?!) where the students play games and do programming every Wednesday. It has been hard to attract girls to the computer club and this event was, among other things, a way to try to get more girls interested.

They all succeeded to make a game and a controller. To make the game we had to talk about programming and math (like coordinate systems and Pythagoras’s theorem) and to make the controllers they needed to understand some electronics.

To make it easier to get started, a web service was used to create and run the code. First Mikael and Pontus explained how to make graphical objects and then how to make a simple cat-and-mouse-game.

They designed their own controllers and used MaKey MaKey to build them.

I think it was a good way to show how learning can be a lot of fun and I hope more students get opportunities like this in the future. Learning by gaming was a success 🙂

P.S: Guess what I got as a gift 😉

Pictures taken by Mikael Tylmad.