Thursday

Even kids can make their own 'Flappy Bird' game in 15 minutes with this simple tool


What better way to celebrate a flappy, er, happy first birthday than teaching children to make their own "Flappy Bird" game?

A US-based organization advocating computer science education did just that, posting on its website the code for making a "Flappy Game."

"Flappy Bird is a simple game, and using the basics of computer science, any student can create their own version with endless possibilities," Code.org said on its website.

With the code, it said children can build their own Flappy game, "whether it’s Flappy Bird, or Flappy Easter Bunny, Flappy Santa, Flappy Shark with Lasers, Flappy Fairy or Flappy Underwater Unicorn."


It also said that with the code, any student can create his or her own variation of the popular but now-defunct mobile game "with endless possibilities."





"You can make your own rules, and make your flappy game as easy or as hard as you want. You can even reverse the scoring or make it change randomly as you play," Code.org said.

But best of all, it said students can share the code with one click so their friends can play the game on any computer or phone, or even inside Facebook or Twitter.

Meanwhile, Code.org also marked its birthday with one billion lines of code written by students in under three months.

"Since we launched the Hour of Code and its follow-up course in December, over 27 million users, in 34 languages, across 170 countries together wrote one billion lines of code in our tutorials," it said.

In 15 minutes

A separate report on GeekWire said the code allows children to develop their own "Flappy Bird" game in 15 minutes.

It quoted Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi, a Seattle entrepreneur who founded Code.org with his brother Ali, as saying the idea for a "Flappy Bird" tutorial came about during a Code.org employee happy hour.

"The entire group was playing Flappy Bird competitively when they realized they could not only play this fun game, but also let others create it," it said.

“We already know that the chance to ‘make an app’ is something people aspire to, but they think it’s out of reach. We want to give kids something that lets them express a degree of creativeness,” Partovi said.

“There are endless possibilities and kids can try them and realize the creativity involved in computer science within just 20 minutes,” Partovi added.

Code.org described itself as a "non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science education by making it available in more schools, and increasing participation by women and underrepresented students of color."

"Our vision is that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer programming. We believe computer science should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra," it said. — VC/TJD, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com