Hopscotch

We had a few people talk to us in our ECMP 355 class: Brian, Zoe, Michelle & Jared. They each had new information to share with us and they built off each other and related their ideas to each other. I really enjoyed listening to them speak!

I downloaded Hopscotch on my iPad and played around with it. After about an hour of playing around I created a little game. Below you can see my game. I had some monkeys moving around the screen and the character you would play is a little yellow dinosaur. The objective of the game is to catch the alien in the bottom of the screen. Everything on the screen moves around. If you touch a monkey you get sent back to the start and if you touch the alien you grow 3%. Overtime, you grow bigger and it's tough to get to the alien without getting caught by the monkeys!!!

This program is definitely fun to play around with and I think kids would have a lot of fun with it. I feel like this would be a fun program for older kids because some of the concepts deal with older topics when creating the game. For example, you choose on an x and y axis where you want all the animals to start and then you choose how they move by pressing: "move x axis -100" or "move y axis 300." Younger children wouldn't understand the x/y concept on the graph.

Another concept I found very neat was that you could view other programs other people created and you could also view how they set it up! That was so neat because while planning my game there were things I wasn't sure how to do so I would look at other examples and view them and understand how they did them!

I would recommend downloading this on your iPad or phone and playing around for a while. It's really neat but a little complicated. It can be frustrating when you don't understand what to do or how to make things work the way you want. There isn't really instructions so you just have to use trial and error to figure things out!

Good luck!!