Digital Gaming Gets Class Time at CV

There was a day, not so long ago, when a computer game where birds crashed into little green pigs was just an idea.

Many Chartiers Valley High School students probably have played that game, or similar ones. But it’s likely that few had set out to design a game of their own.

That changed over the past school year, with the introduction of the Digital Art and Design class, and on Monday hundreds of students got to try their skills at computer games their classmates designed and built.

“I’m always getting up on a soapbox and preaching that these things are tools,” said Digital Arts teacher Chris McHugh. “The tools are just things you can use, if you know how. If you make something mind-blowing, it’s because you did it.”

The games are simple, but—like so many found on websites or smart phone apps—they hold the possibility of being absolutely addictive.

Most games had a relatively simple premise. “The Adventures of Hobo Terry,” for example, asks the player to jump over unicorns, collect flowers, and ultimately gain enough points to save Prince Raúl.

But the Digital Art students used various media to design the games, and built them from scratch using Adobe Photoshop and Flash—a web coding system most students had never used, and that requires a lot of intricate code.

Lines and lines of code.

The game “City Flyer” required about 200 lines of code—per level. The design of “Underwater Adventure” started as watercolor paintings that were scanned and modified, thus becoming digital art.

Players were required to fly, jump and swim through about a dozen games that didn’t exist before students created them.

“It was pretty difficult,” said sophomore Alex Mosesso, who did much of the programming for “Hobo Terry.” “It was so tedious, and if one little thing didn’t work you had to figure it out and go all through the code.”

Seeing the finished product was worth it, she said. There was still some work to do on her group’s game, but the toughest part was learned and done.

McHugh said the class was designed for students to dive into new programs and learn the coding, debugging, and design elements behind the Internet applications they see and use daily.

Web Development teacher Chris Meyer said the gaming fair was designed to bring together students from multiple disciplines to work on a common project.

Web Design students created web sites in Adobe Fireworks and Dreamweaver to showcase the games. Marketing students created materials to market the event.

Technology Education students created promotional T-shirts and materials for the game fair, and statistics students were camped outside the Gaming Fair entrance, doing survey-based market research to determine the potential interest and market success of each game.

All in all, a smooth operation that was pulled off with few glitches, and one the high school hopes to make an annual event.

“This was a learning experience for everyone. We might make some tweaks for next year, but this is going well,” Meyer said. “This is nice because with the project-based learning, it’s cross-curricular. It really runs the gambit.”

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