As appeared in The Colorodoan – article about our CO summer camps in Fort Collins

Using Award-Winning Half-Life® 2 as…

As appeared in the Palo Alto Daily News…

As appeared in The Colorodoan – article about our CO summer camps in Fort Collins

June 18th, 2010 by: Elise

Kids’ computer characters take form at tech camp

By Marcy Miranda

Inside one of the rooms at CSU’s Academic Village residence hall, 11-year-old Joey Marsden of Fort Collins spent the last week creating a game using characters from the Super Mario Bros. series.

“I started it Monday, and it’s almost completely done,” Joey said.

Joey was among 18 students participating this week in iD Tech Camps, a summer camp being held at Colorado State University and more than 60 other college campuses across the country, said Monty King the camp’s CSU director and an instructor. The camps are tailored to teach students what it takes to design computer games during the course of one week, King said.

“The ultimate goal is to create a game and start understanding the basics of video game design,” King said.

Younger kids are taught game design basics, such as making characters move and setting the scene for the game. Children ages 10 to 15 can design multilevel arcade-style games, similar to Mario Bros. and Tetris, King said.

During the course of the week, Joey has learned to write scripts, or the commands that give computer keys different functions. His game, simply called Bowser, featured the popular video game’s flame-throwing dragon battling another character, the dinosaur Toad.

“The scripts are behind the video game,” he said.

Joey said he has enjoyed his week at camp because of the opportunities to work with computers.

“I wanted to do this camp because I love working with computers,” he said.

Ten-year-old Claire Russell likes computer games and has previous experience with programming because she was on her school’s robotics team. For her, learning how to create a game from scratch was a great way to spend part of the summer, she said.

“My video program is called the mysterious teleporting starfish,” Claire said, as a blue dog walked across her computer screen lined with layers of multiple open windows. “It’s about a detective dog and starfish.”

In addition to learning how to use Scratch, a basic computer design program, and Photoshop, an image creating program, students learn to embed music within the games.

They will present their finished products to their parents today and will have the chance to take them home and share the games with their friends, King said.

Nine-year-old Casey Rough’s video game pitted an army – led by Frankenstein – against a slew of zombies controlled by pop star Justin Bieber. This was his second year participating in the camp. He said this summer, his focus was on learning to use the liquefy tool in Photoshop to morph images.

Casey said he’s an avid computer and video game fan and regularly visits online game sites recommended by his friends.

“Computers are probably man’s greatest creation. You can do practically anything with a computer,” he said.