Create PT Reflection
The AP CSP Create Task requires students apply their skills of programming to create a computer program through an incremental and iterative process. This task gives students the opportunity to collaborate making this program which I took, creating the program with 2 other students. The first step in the process was coming up with an idea for the game. We considered what the story would be, how the game would be played, what was the eventual goal, and many other things. The idea my team eventually came up with was a survival game in which the user dodges falling rocks and tries to survive as long as possible. We then needed to storyboard for our game. The game was broken into 2 parts, one consisting of the story and the other the gameplay. The story would have 2 screens, a dialogue screen and a screen to start the game, and the gameplay would also have 2 screens, the game screen and the game over screen, the screens following the order as described.
Next came taking our ideas and storyboard and forming them into a digital product. Each member of the team took on different parts of the game. One of my team members handled creating the art assets of the game and the other focused on creating the timer to track how long the player survived. That left me with creating the gameplay functionalities. I needed to focus on many gameply aspects: giving the player the ability to move, making the rocks fall, and setting the screen to game over once the player hits a rock. I started by defining all the variables I would need for gameplay, such as the variables that would store the x and y positions of the player and the rocks. I then moved onto creating low level functions I envisioned my higher level functions to use, two of which being the function that allows the player to move and the function that detects when the player hit a rock. With the lower level functions defined I finally moved onto completing the higher level functions, such as the function that updated the screen every few milliseconds to reflect current player and rock positions and the time that has passed.
A major difficulty I encountered while I was programming was redundant code. I was creating functions with the mindset that they'll only be used in the sections of the game I was working in but when my teammates requested I make similar functions for their parts I found my self writing essentially the same functions with one or two different words. The code of the game became unnecessarily long and sometimes the game would run slow. I fixed this issue by rewriting the functions to take parameters. This way I didn't need to copy and paste functions for my teammates to use, they could just simply put in parameters necessary for the function to work in their part of the game.
Once my team finished coding we each created a video of the game, answered questions about our game, and submitted it all to the College Board. This task benefited us as web designers since it tested our skills to collaborate on big projects. I feel my team collaborated well since there was little confusion and we finished on time. We had good communication and we knew who was doing what at a particular moment. Because of our good communication when it came time to combine codes there were little to no problems encountered because we were coding with each other in mind. Additionally, we kept each other on task and worked efficiently to meet the deadline.
Next came taking our ideas and storyboard and forming them into a digital product. Each member of the team took on different parts of the game. One of my team members handled creating the art assets of the game and the other focused on creating the timer to track how long the player survived. That left me with creating the gameplay functionalities. I needed to focus on many gameply aspects: giving the player the ability to move, making the rocks fall, and setting the screen to game over once the player hits a rock. I started by defining all the variables I would need for gameplay, such as the variables that would store the x and y positions of the player and the rocks. I then moved onto creating low level functions I envisioned my higher level functions to use, two of which being the function that allows the player to move and the function that detects when the player hit a rock. With the lower level functions defined I finally moved onto completing the higher level functions, such as the function that updated the screen every few milliseconds to reflect current player and rock positions and the time that has passed.
A major difficulty I encountered while I was programming was redundant code. I was creating functions with the mindset that they'll only be used in the sections of the game I was working in but when my teammates requested I make similar functions for their parts I found my self writing essentially the same functions with one or two different words. The code of the game became unnecessarily long and sometimes the game would run slow. I fixed this issue by rewriting the functions to take parameters. This way I didn't need to copy and paste functions for my teammates to use, they could just simply put in parameters necessary for the function to work in their part of the game.
Once my team finished coding we each created a video of the game, answered questions about our game, and submitted it all to the College Board. This task benefited us as web designers since it tested our skills to collaborate on big projects. I feel my team collaborated well since there was little confusion and we finished on time. We had good communication and we knew who was doing what at a particular moment. Because of our good communication when it came time to combine codes there were little to no problems encountered because we were coding with each other in mind. Additionally, we kept each other on task and worked efficiently to meet the deadline.
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