How Wes Fryer Ruined My Day

But in a good way!

One of the readings that I caught this morning was a post from Dr. Fryer on his blog.  “Hopscotch Challenges: A Free Curriculum eBook for iPad Coders“.  I really enjoy the Hopscotch application, having blogged about it here.  To date, my enjoyment has been just randomly creating a bunch of code to do this and that as I want.

However, Wes has identified a need for Hopscotch users – ideas and challenges for use in the classroom.  As he notes in the post, the Hour of Code will soon be here and there will be many people interested in trying some coding projects in the iPad classroom.  It’s a perfect marriage.

If that’s you, you need to run over and download his eBook for inspiration.

For me, my current infatuation is the ability to control the movement of a character on the screen just by tilting the iPad.  In fact, one of the first things that I did when I first downloaded Hopscotch was to create my own Etch-A-Sketch simulator.  After reading the eBook, I decided to put some objects on the screen and use the collision detection to make things happen when you hit something.  Lots of fun there.  But, to make it a skill testing application, place various objects on the screen and use the directional tilting to enable the character to run through a maze.

Computer science folks will recognize looping, collision detection, acceleration, etc. that can quickly be built into the application.  Here’s a screen capture from early in the project.

Yeah, I’ll confess.  I spent way, way too much time on it.  But I spent even more and generated a number of other toys that I had a whale of a time with!

Grab the eBook (it’s free) and enjoy it for yourself.

Thanks for taking the initiative to do this, Wes, and for making it free to all who are interested.

Related articles

• Hopscotch Challenges: A Free Curriculum eBook for iPad Coders (speedofcreativity.org)
• Preparing for STEM Lessons on Coding with Hopscotch for iPad (speedofcreativity.org)
• Planning for Coding (thinkingthroughmylens.wordpress.com)
• Hopscotch | Coding for Kids (swiss-miss.com)
• More Adventures in Coding (thinkingthroughmylens.wordpress.com)