Written by Kevin Rabinovich
After seeing something you really loved, have you ever thought to yourself, “Wow. How could I create something as amazing as that?” It can be really overwhelming—even seemingly impossible—especially if you’ve never done anything like it before. At CodeDay, though, we show students that they don’t have to have even a single day of experience to create something they love; there’s always a starting point.
That’s exactly what happened last weekend at IT-oLogy. At 12:00pm on Saturday, 30 students sat down in the Classroom, and prepared for the next 24 hours. First, idea pitching. Next, a planning session, followed by introductory programming and game development workshops, and after that, participants coded and designed their games through the night.
Of course, some mandatory breaks had to happen, even though the students were reluctant to take their hands off of their keyboards for more than a minute, so a game of FizzBuzz (a quick group math game) was played, and at around 11:00pm, antsy-ness was very much in the air, so everyone took a walk to the graveyard across the street.
The groups worked well, as the more experienced members of each team worked with the beginners to catch them up and answer any questions they had, and as a result, every team except one had a complete and fully-functional game built by the end of the 24 hours! One participant, who’d never had programming experience prior to CodeDay, thought his experience was rewarding and learned all about how hard it was to code and build a game from scratch.
