Years 7 and 8
Students begin by creating a simple a pong game in Scratch. Students can work independently to follow the Pong Game Scratch tutorial available here. Alternatively, they can jump straight into Scratch and find a Pong Game tutorial under the Tutorials menu.
No experience with Scratch is required for students to follow the tutorial. Completing the tutorial up to the step ‘Add Code to Bounce the Ball Off the Paddle’ will take no more than 15 to 20 minutes.
In Scratch, students will have a sprite that bounces around the screen and another sprite it can bounce off. Once students have a ‘ball’ sprite colliding with a ‘paddle’ sprite, pause their coding and explore the following questions as a class:
Girls and other students may not be confident engaging with this task immediately if they haven’t had prior exposure to block-based programming. This challenge may be even greater for students for whom English is an additional language. Ensure you provide adequate time for students to explore the program and encourage students to persevere with the instructions. If some students complete the task and can help others, ensure that they follow the ‘hands off’ rule where they explain and provide advice, but only the student creating the game touches the screen or keyboard!
Explain to students that a key aspect of engagement in video games and apps is how immersive the ‘world’ of the game is – how real it feels to the player. For this to happen and for the on-screen world to make sense, it must follow predictable rules. In terms of how things move and behave in space, this means it needs to be a world that takes physics into account. Consider how lollies fall in a grid-based game, how birds are catapulted, how characters require momentum to make jumps or how they float in underwater environments – the game needs to be designed taking into account the forces acting on an object.
Students may be surprised to hear game developers don’t usually need to write complex physics formulas to create these games. Instead, they rely on what are called ‘physics engines’, which are software packages that supply physics for the game. Similar software packages are used in computer-animated movies.
Some of the techniques physics engines use include the following:
Each of these techniques uses a variety of algorithms based on physical laws to perform the simulations.
Many girls may not associate women with careers in computer game design and animation design. Sharing profiles of female role models can help counter these stereotypes. A great place to start is this interview with Clara Reeves, CEO of Australian game studio Hipster Whale (the developers of Crossy Road).
Read moreTell students they are going to design their own game and to consider the forces they’ll need to represent to make their game feel real. To be challenged creatively, they’re going to create a game idea that includes some randomly selected variables: the world, the character and a key object.
World/environment |
Character |
Object |
Underwater |
Giraffe |
Skateboard |
The moon |
Chicken |
Toy duck |
Ice-cream land |
Alien |
Spoon |
Connecting the creativity of game design to physics demonstrates the potential for harnessing creativity in a STEM career. Many girls do not appreciate the creative opportunities within STEM, particularly with references to physical sciences.
Students use their game idea sketch to design a screen (or screens) for the game that show how they’ve considered interactions between force, motion and mass within their game.
Depending on their familiarity with and access to digital animation tools, students can choose how to represent their screens: