GEGNZ Student Summit

Have you ever heard of GEGNZ? Well our Yr 7 & 8 extension group got the opportunity to attend this Google Education Group New Zealand Student Summit. This took place at Ormiston Junior College and Primary on Friday the 11th of August and we were accompanied by many other schools around New Zealand. There about four hundred other students there for this event.



At the beginning of the Summit we all met in the college hall/theatre. The opening speech was from the Young Ocean Explorers. They spoke to us about their underwater adventures and what they had experienced. The explorers were a farther and a daughter. They shared with us their scariest experience and their best experience and it influenced me to be brave around the ocean.

The schools that attended this event got to either explore workshops or host a workshop showing what they had created using technology or coding. There were a lot of fun and creative entertaining workshops we got to choose from on that day. We had three sessions, in our first selection of workshops we were taught how to use all these different entertaining technology, they were, makey makey, Ozmo, Mbot, and many more. In our second session it was our turn to host a workshop, we had at least three people acting as game guiders and the rest of us presented at our stand.

Space Invaders

Intro:
Have you ever created a game using code? Well if you are 13 years of age, your not quite experienced, your partner keeps slacking off and you have made one; then you know exactly what state I am in right now. Stressing at first but relieving when it is finally complete.

Task:
For the past 10 weeks my partner, Cameo and I were assigned to create a game on scratch using our knowledge from last terms experience. The theme was based on space. We needed to include space facts that we read off sites and set challenges for the main sprite in our game.

Starting our Game
Getting started was not a problem but moving on to the next levels was quite tricky. We had to broadcast our sprite on to another backdrop and add a code to the backdrop to receive the broadcast so it would switch backgrounds. If that second step wasn't included than the background would stay the same which was frustrating at times.

Problem Solving
Our second level had the most issues, when trying to get our sprite (spaceship) to shoot at the enemies. Luckily, we had the internet! Tutorials were really useful when we had no help from Zoe. We were eager to learn and extend our knowledge of coding especially if we didn't have an experienced coding adult in the room who worked at O.M.G Tech to help us with it.

Highlight Levels
Level three and four were our easiest levels to work on. The third level had 15 martians attacking and one bullet point where you had to get to; to receive your bit of space information. Our fourth and last level, showed the earth orbiting the sun and had some obstacles around it to block the sprites way from reaching earth.

Conclusion
Unfortunately, my partner and I were terrible at communicating. We also weren't the best group at managing our time wisely. Our game could have been better and more complex if we had done so. So these are one of the main things we need to work on for next time.

Creating Code

This presenttion is a reflection of a game that a group of people and I have created. It includes the rules of our game, our sprites/avatars and challenges. The two other people I created the game with was Moroni and Danielle. If you would like to have a go at our game here is a link. Have a go and enjoy!