Take our Daughters and Sons to Work Day 2017

Ok, next episode of my adventures running "Take our daughters and Sons to work day" events, the 2017 edition.  This one was a lot less ambitious than the 2016 year.  In 2016, I had access to dozens of used keyboards, mice and most importantly, Monitors.  Back then I had more influence on how IT assets were handled, and we had just started a transition from dual 17" monitors to single 24" or 27" monitors. So I was swimming in equipment. There were some reorgs and personnel changes that eliminated all my stock of used equipment.

I pressed on, just the same.  This year I decided to a scratch game on laptops.  It lowered the entry barrier as most parents had a laptop laying around and there were a few spares here in the office.   We had 10 kids for this event.  We almost didn't have a conference room which made for some more drama.  There where a few high profile exec meetings that needed the larger rooms I would ordinarily use.

Anyway, we got things sorted and we got on our way.

Once again I used the book Coding Games in Scratch by Jon Woodcock. In his book he walks you through several different games you can build in scratch, and we did one based on the 'Doom On The Broom' game with a few tweaks and variations.  We called it Bat Blaster.   Started with an overview of Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu - everyone needed an account).

Next we made some simple animations to teach them how to interact with motion and sprites, etc, and then we got into the game.  I'd have a slide on the projector with all the blocks they would need and what we're trying to do.   I would also spend a minute talking about where each block was in the block pallet and what each block was doing, especially in this case where we introduce variables and doing mathematic operations on variables.

The next slide would be the pieces all put together.  I'd walk the room helping folks who got stuck somewhere.

We would then add new features, like making the bats faster or adding ghosts.  For the folks who could stay longer we started re-skinning the game.  Instead of witches and wizards shooting bats, heroes shooting zombies or space ships shooting aliens.  We also changed it so the sprite was no longer pinned to the middle of the screen and floated forward, like the ship in asteroids.  It was a much simpler day than the year before and went quite well.