Turning Teens into Teachers with GDevelop - Part 3
Maria Scheel-Lonsdale
Posted
This is the 3rd part of a series of 3 articles about teens teaching GDevelop to other kids.
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Why should you try teaching with GDevelop? Well, we all know that making games e.g. makes you a master in your own environment and material. However, teaching others how to understand enough to make their own games, getting questions along the way, maybe outside of your material and knowledge, teaches you to problem solve issues and look at other ways to do it. This will give you even more knowledge, develop your way of thinking and solve issues based on questions on how-to you might not have thought of yourself.
Read the 1st part about prepping the workshop and the 2nd part about the experience of the workshop.
Overall experience of having this workshop
“It was an awesome experience!” - quote from the two teens. We also talked about how to refine the process for another time, if they wanted to do it again next season. This was a definite “YES!!”, they had so much fun passing their knowledge to others, precisely as I had hoped! And they learn a whole lot about each other and how they both code. How to work as a team and actually enjoying searching for bugs as a team 😄
They also learned much more about each other, understanding how eachother codes and how it works and problem solving for issues or bumps along the way, thinking creatively to reach better solutions.
Challenges and solutions found along the way
The teens experienced a bit of a challenge, when trying to figure out why the life in one of the kids games didn’t work. They needed a way of debugging the kids' code somehow.
“We missed having a way of co-coding on our project making the game in the first place. We experienced working parallel instead, working on different areas of the game. But if one had edited in the code other places to make their feature work, then the trouble came merging the features together in one game, if the other feature depended on the rest of the code not being changed 😅 “ - quote from the teens.
This was not doable in the long run, so the teens searched for other ways to make the process more easy for them.
“But we learned that we could send it in parts, so this is what we ended up doing. We copy pasted the code in pieces into a google document, to each other, so the other could copy paste it into their game 😉 “ - quote from the teens.
They also got more familiar with the program and how to come around issues like, finding the center point of the sprite using the centerpoint sometimes made it go up in the right corner, were X and Y coordinates to find the middle of the sprite, were more helpful, but gave them some trouble if they hadn’t made the sprite centered in the first place. They were missing some sort of radio button that could snap to the middle of the object or let them move the anchor. To come around this they moved their sprite to the middle👍.
Improvements for next time
“Strategically we might do it a bit differently, among others use a big screen for all the participants to follow at the same time. This to decrease the time you need to be 1:1 og 1:2 to guide them.” - quote from the teens.
We talked about making the setup for another time even easier to teach and learn from. The game they made was super, and they passed it forward really well, even though they used no behaviors in this game. “We might use behaviors next time, to make it even more easy for others to make” - quote from the teens.
Conclusion
“We found it was super fun to teach other kids about GDevelop, having a simple game is incredibly important that can always be further developed for those who are quick to set it up. We would love to do it again!” - quote from the teens. The teens are already working on a new game to teach from in the spring.
Wanna get even better at what you do? Try teaching it to others. You will by guarantee experience a higher level of understanding and knowledge of what you do.
This is definitely not the last time these young teens get the opportunity to hold their own workshop for other kids, teaching them how to create with GDevelop!
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