Week 1

The first half of week one of the coding camp had a focus on solving pen and paper ciphers while also teaching the basics of python. While the second half was focused on the Enigma machine, spy stories, and programming simple events. As a class they helped pseudocode the 3 rotor wheels of the Enigma machine, while I coded it in front of them and engaged them in several ways to encrypt messages.

Here's a quick look at the ceasar cipher they copied down on their computers and tested sending messages to eachother to read.

They also spent some time learning book ciphers using a book of their choosing as the key. Leaving secert messages for eachtoher to figure out.

Week 2: Pokemon Game Days 1 and 2

We started off with a lesson on game design and set up Unity and Visual Studio Code. Playing some games from CodeMonkey to get the students in the mood to see the different parts of game design all coming together. My main focus with this is to, provide them with code in blocks they can put together to learn the core concepts if object oriented languages, UI design, and completing their first small project in C# that they can be proud of and look back on coding with a positive memory. Hopefully this project will help kindle a fire for future passions in technology or science.

Day 2 Started with a fun activity from this site here: https://technovationchallenge.org/curriculum/coding-2/#act1, where a father pretended to be a computer following his childrens commands. The students replicated this with a puzzle game in the classroom. After that we took a while to discuss classes and how they use their idea of what a Pokemon is to make an object in the game engine. We finished off the day collecting images for their Pokemon.

Days 3-5

On day three the students reviewed what had been previously taught about classes and data types. From there they spent the day making pokemon from the pictures they gathered the day before. Giving them levels, names, attacks, and a type, some of them got really creative in this process.

    //Name of our Pokemon
        public string pokemonName;
    
        //The amount of health or HP our pokemon has
        public int baseHealth;
        public int maxHealth;
        public int currentHealth;
        //The level the pokemon is, will increase its health and damage
        public int level;
    
        public int damage;
    
        //This saves the type of pokemon we have
    
        public pokemonType pType;
    
        //These are the possible types the pokemon can be
        public enum pokemonType { water, fire, rock, grass, electric, normal, flying, fighting, posion, pyschic, dragon, fairy, steel }
        public enum attackType { test} 

Day 4: Day for is when the game level was made, the excitement was thick in the room. Using the prefabs they made the day before I provided them with a gamemanager script to drag their pokemon into, and let them battle they set up the UI(they got to drag the boxes and place where everything went/what color it was) Some of them used pictures they found online for the grass where the Pokemon stand. But by they end of the day they had a really simple battle setup.

Day 5: the final day was polish, they got to make a main menu with a play and quit button. They learned more about how UI works and how buttons work. Using pictures they found or using the pokemon prefabs they made they spent a good bit of time customizing their menus. Once that was done, and any problems they had were settled the kids took their laptops over to some of the younger students to show them their games and let them play. They got to explain to their friends how they made the game and mostly how it worked. It was a great feeling seeing how happy and proud they were to have made their frist video game no matter how simple it was. Looking back at the week, the project was far more successful than I thought it was, and hearing some of them still wanting to work on little things on it afterwards was a really rewarding experince for me. Knowing that they did learn a lot and that they had a ton of fun in the process made all the prepwork and time spent on it definitely worth it.