Full lab time, full working time

Today was a full lab time, which meant full working day! The programmer of the team started working on the game and the artist started creating the asset. In the middle, like previous summer camp, we taught the kids some nice feature that they would use for their game.

As I predicted, Cade was way beyond all the other kids. He had a platformer-like game. You started at the top of the screen and you felt down by the gravity. Your objective was not to fall off the screen by jumping to platforms which were spawned randomly and moving upward. I helped him a bit figuring out GameMaker's gravity and collision-free. It was easy to work with him. He grabbed every logic that I told him. The fact that he ever used GameMaker before was indeed useful but that wasn't the main reason. The main reason was he got what it needed to be a programmer: logic and passion! Because of that, I wasn't hesitant at all doing coding with him. My only concern was he ever used GameMaker before and he would find the class boring.

Gladly that didn't happen. I was happy when he said that the GameMaker version we used was different from the one he had used before and he learnt new things during the camp. He was indeed an interesting kid and I believe in the future he would be a good programmer.

Because he had experience with GameMaker and he was indeed advanced the rest of the class, we had told him yesterday that we would him individually to do more advanced things than we taught for the class. And that's what I did today. Well, I, indeed, was more experienced with GameMaker compared to Chris and Jake. But that also made me felt bad for the rest of the kids. Because I was helping him with more advanced stuff, I mostly sat beside him and kind of ignoring other kids. Of course I didn't mean it. Therefore once in a while I told him that I need to leave to help other kids.

In addition of being genius, he was quiet nice, too. He helped the other team working on the jumping - making our job easier. I was happy how they were helping each other. Oh, one thing that I noticed, we had no kids who only playing games during lab hour!!

While sitting on the back row assisting Cade, we also had a nice discussion of how to learn programming. He said he wanted to prepare himself with programming before taking formal education. He told me that his father suggested him to learn from JavaScript which is easy to learn. However I suggested him to learn from C++ which is more standard in industry - not only in game industry but also in a lot of industry. Well, I hoped when he got home and discuss it with his Dad, he will start learning C++ like I suggested.