I was very pleased to get this project off the ground, recently I have spoke out publicly about the decline of programmers numbers and the absurdity of removing computing from the curriculum, so I feel very fortunate to be able to make a change to this however small that is. Over the last couple of weeks I have put together a teaching plan to teach secondary school children the basics of computing and video game making.

Firstly using tools like Game Maker and then Processing, making a game in Game Maker and then recoding it in Processing so they can learn about game dynamics and computing. Today was their first lesson and they were very good, very polite and very talented. We have only designed the “Good Guys”, “Bad Guys” and “Items” but things are looking good for the next lesson in which we will look at the backgrounds and level design.

Unfortunately there isn’t a qualification at the end of the course, but hopefully they will be inspired to use computers more creatively, even if it’s only one of them that goes on to program, that’s one more.

I should have some pictures of the games soon, and I will keep you updated on their progress.