Students in grades 4-8 from throughout the Comox Valley converged at Lake Trail Community School Thursday (May 11) for a coding arcade.
Approximately 250 students from local schools spent as long as eight months, designing computer games, all of which were on display in the gymnasium at Lake Trail “Code Quest 2023.”
“Some of them started in October, some of them started after Christmas, most of them have been working on (the projects) for at least two months,” said Kara Dawson, the information technology support teacher at School District 71, and organizer of Code Quest 2023. “I have the pleasure of going to all the schools and all the classes and helping the teachers and the students learn how to do more with technology.”
There were 186 displays inside the Lake Trail gym. A lot of the projects were created by groups of students. Approximately 400 students were expected to attend Code Quest and try their hand at the arcade games on display, making this the largest Code Quest to date. This was the third such arcade, and the first one since the pandemic.
The reason for the project is multi-faceted.
“The purpose of the game is to teach somebody something, so most of the games have some sort of learning aspect, but the purpose of them designing the games is for them to learn the process of using coding - learning how to create an algorithm,” said Dawson.
“They are learning a ton of stuff about problem-solving, and collaborating for a lot of them. Even if they are not working in a group, they are working with their peers to help each other get this done. Just the debugging process in these games is a whole lesson in problem-solving, taking problems apart to find where the issue is, and just thinking things through really carefully. And they are also showing their creativity.”
That creativity was on full display on Thursday. The graphics for many of the games were app-worthy.
Chloe, Eli, Carmen and Bentley are Grade 5 students at Huband Elementary. Their game was all about the circulatory system.
“There are two levels in our game,” explained Chloe. “The first level is a heart-pumping game, so you start with a heart and you click it until you get to about 15 clicks, and then you get asked a question about the circulatory system. If you answer correctly, you get boosted up to 30 points, but if you answer wrong, you go back to zero.”
Players continue through checkpoints until they have answered enough questions correctly to get to 110 points, which advances them to the next level.
“The next level is a maze game, and you are a blood cell, travelling through the veins,” said Chloe. “Once you make it through to the end, you get congratulations, you’ve finished the game, and you get a few more facts about the circulatory system.
“We chose this topic because we were learning about the body’s systems, and we realized lots of people like clicker games and maze games so that’s why we chose the games we did.”
Dawson said the entire process has been a learning opportunity for herself as well as the students.
“They teach me a lot as well,” she said. “When I am teaching them how to do the coding, they are teaching me how to do different things with it. It’s amazing how they can just take this abstract thought and put it all together.”
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terry.farrell@comoxvalleyrecord.com
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