I'm always looking for material which might push those students who pick up coding the fastest in my classes to go even further. Writing computer games often challenges even expert programmers more than producing other kinds of software and many young people enjoy playing computer games. I know when I was a child I always wanted to be able to make my own games. I thought, "Is it possible to make simple games using only knowledge taught on the Code First:Girls Beginners course?" I believe it is possible and so I recreated this classic Hangman game as a demonstration. Even this example has more complex CSS than is necessary to achieve good gameplay. While producing things such as the latest high speed 3D shooters requires specialist skills, old school techniques took ingenuity to think up but are relatively easy to understand and replicate.
I decided to limit my creative efforts to using only these programming constructions:
-
HTML tags.
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Simple CSS in familiar the
selector { property-name: value;
… }
format.
-
No
@
rules except for @font-face
and simple media queries to examine the width and height of the window.
-
No CSS functions except for
url()
and linear-gradient()
.
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Lots of Bootstrap.
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Simple JavaScript: variables, functions,
if
…else
and while
.
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Simple JQuery.
I did use a few CSS properties that students won't have seen examples of in class. I expect an upper ability student to be able to discover these for themselves by searching on Google, w3schools.com or CSS-Tricks.
Disclaimer: Depending on the rate of progress experienced with each cohort during each individual session we don't always get time to cover every advanced technique that we would ideally like to cover with every group of students.