Our Progress - Check out what Kodu Club is up to!
Week 4
Week 4 was also a great week! We started off the session by talking about our stories and how we were going to plan our day from what we had in our stories. We also revised our stories based on what we learned last week about what we could do with Kodu. After that, we spent some time learning more new tricks to add to our games. We learned how to program a character to move on a certain path in whatever directions we wanted. We had lots of fun designing interesting paths and having the characters move around exactly how we wanted them to!
After our fun with programing pathways for our characters, we learned how to take control of a specific character. Up to this point, the characters in our games were designed to move around randomly or on a specific path, but weren't controlled by the user at all. When the game started, the characters just moved around according to how we programmed them. Everything changed when we learned how to take control of a certain character using the XBox controller. Students were controlling everything from a turtle to a cloud through their new worlds. It really was amazing to see how creative things became when this new possibility was introduced.
After the students learned how to program a path and how to control a character, they were given the most time so far to develop their worlds and games. They took full advantage of this time and spent a great deal of time problem solving through trial and error with what they wanted to be able to do while controlling a character. We also gave students the option to begin to come to school early in the mornings to keep working on their creations. I was happily surprised when about 11 kids came an hour early to school to work on Kodu!
Check out Week 4 pictures HERE!
Week 3
Update! - Check out Mr. Braman's radio interview with Barnaby and Friends on WLHT! - HERE (Be patient, it may take a little while to load!) Week 3 was a great week and we really got going much farther into having the kids create more of their worlds and games. We started the day by talking about our new "fame" from our Front Page article in the Grand Rapids Press. The kids were excited for themselves and each other and talked about seeing each other's pictures and quotes in the paper. You can check out our article HERE! We then continued by watching a surprise video that the Kodu team from Microsoft Research put together just for our Kodu Club! We got to meet all of the designers and all of the people involved in making Kodu and the processes they go through to make Kodu possible. It looks like they have a lot of fun doing what they do. It was neat for the kids to see the people that make our project a reality!
After the fun of meeting the Kodu team, we dug into more of the game programming. We began by reviewing the things the kids liked best about exploring their basic terrain worlds. It seemed that they really liked to make hills and mountains and water. We then went through how to make their land go up and down and how to smooth out the terrain that they created. Next we made valleys and filled them with water. This was easier to do when we talked about how water works in the real world; how it fills up low points in the landscape. This helped students to focus their strategies on adding water to their world. The next step was to learn how to add land to our small island. We learned how to make different surfaces like brick, metal, grass, and other surfaces to our existing world. Out of all of the steps we learned about this week, the students surprised me the most when it came to their creativity in adding terrain. Students were adding land like crazy; some were spelling their name in new terrain for their characters to travel through, while others multiplied their area of land by huge amounts. I am excited to see what they come up with after even more time!
This week students had more time than any other week to begin working on their stories. We had so many different worlds and stories with different characters and landscapes. One student even designed his world almost entirely underwater with only a small hill and a tree standing out of the water. It is great to see such creativity emerge far beyond our expectations in beginning this program.
See a few of our week 3 photos HERE. We were having so much fun this week, it was difficult to focus on taking pictures but make sure to check out the last picture of the huge landscape a student created.
Week 2
Week 2 was awesome! We started off the day with a healthy snack for the first few minutes. After everyone arrived and finished snacks, we got ready for the day. Mrs. Price started by introducing everyone again. We were joined by a few visitors today as well! A reporter and photographer from the Grand Rapids Press came to see what we were up to in Kodu Club. How cool! Students then had some time to share thier completed story to use in designing their games. We then discussed the importance of dialogue in a story. Students brainstormed together to find effective ways to include dialogue in their stories and then sat back down to revise stories to add some dialogue to their stories.
After spending time with stories, students finally had a chance to see the game in action and use the controllers themselves. Each student recieved their own X-box controller to use for Kodu. We had each student log in using their own unique login names to use for the entire project. These names will allow them to save games and use the login to play that same game on any of the computers later if they needed to. After the kids logged in, they had a chance to get used to the controls by looking through a basic world with just a "Boku" character and a tree. Students spent time moving around the world, zooming in and out. Some students were pretty creative with exactly how far they could zoom out and what perspectives they could get from different angles.
After the students had a chance to explore the world, it was time for them to learn how to use the controller to actually make things in the game. We were amazed at how quickly students were able to use the controller to add elements to their world. We practiced how to add a simple apple to our world. Students had a chance to change it's color and where exactly it showed up in the world. The next step was to add some new characters. Students had their choice to pick what kind of character they wanted to add and had a lot of fun with it! We then practiced how to actually program a character to move, then to move when it saw something, and then to move away from something when it saw that object or character. The kids did awesome with using the controlls to problem solve if the prompt that they gave the character didn't work the first time. We found that we had to reposition the Boku a few times to get him to move. At the end of the session, we gave the students about 15 minutes to explore any other feature they wanted. In that small amount of time, it was amazing to see what kind of creations the creative minds of Kodu Club came up with. I can't wait to see what else the Kodu Club students create in the next few weeks!
See Week 2 pictures HERE! Week 1
Kodu Club met for the first time this past week and it was a huge success! We started earlier in the week by letting the students know that they were selected to be a part of Kodu Club at Explorer. You could see and hear the excitement in the room!
On Thursday, February 12, we held our first Kodu Club meeting right after school. We started by making sure each student had a specific number, so that we could track their progress through the project. We then introduced the students to the staff and other volunteers involved in this project and gave an overview of Kodu.
The fun really started when we explained to the students that they were going to each design their own game! The students started this process by writing a draft of a story that they could use as a starting point for their game creations. They had a fun time creating and sharing their stories with each other. They then sketched a picture of what the game would look like from the stories they created. The room was full of dialogue and laughter as the kids shared what they came up with! After we shared, they students finally had a chance to see Kodu in action. Mr. Braman showed the students the game and gave a few examples of how the XBox controller was used to create elements in the game. After he showed them some things, the students started giving examples of what they wanted to see, and we were able to show them and build some great excitement for next week! The kids are extremely excited to get started with Kodu!
Check out some of our pictures HERE!