The Nerd Group
Skills: Teaching, Javascript
GitHub link: https://github.com/BlountNerdGroup
Website Link (Cached from Web Archive) http://web.archive.org/web/20190327182305/http://nerdgroup.org/
The Nerd Group was a class that I co-founded and co-taught for 3 years for students in grades 7-12, from 2016 to 2019. Classes were held once a week during school semesters at a local library. The Nerd Group was independent from any particular school and was open to the entire county. I marketed at the beginning of each semester to get a new group of 15-20 students. Over the duration of 3 years, we taught approximately 100 students, and we created a new lesson each week, either an iteration of a previous lesson that worked well or something entirely new like a game.
Lessons + Screenshots
New lessons were made every week, starting from the fundamentals of programming all the way to fun multi-week projects including the asteroids game, doodle jump, pac-man, and more.
After teaching basic concepts and syntax, the culmination of each semester was building a fun game or two from scratch. The asteroids game is an example of one of these end-of-semester games that students built over the course of 2 classes. We started by showing the students how to build the asteroids, which you can see are collections of shapes. Then, students worked on the ship itself as well as the collision detection between the asteroids and the ship.
The Goblin Game is another example of a game that students got to build at the end of one semester. The Goblin Game was supposed to show students the basics of how game enemy AI works. In the game, the goblins try to chase after the player, and the player and the dragon try to shoot the monsters. The dragon and the goblins are both controlled by basic heuristics that make them appear to be artificially intelligent.
I recreated Pac-Man in javascript for an advertising workshop that I hosted at a local junior high school. My goal was to show students the basics of coding in 5 minutes or less. I tried to accomplish this in a couple of ways. First, I created a 2D array to represent the Pac-Man tiles. That way, students could change the values within this 2D array literal and immediately see the tiles change in the Pac-Man game. I also showed students how Pac-Man has various variables associated with it, including color, speed, etc. that they can individually change. Overall, I think the workshop was successful because there were several students who found that they enjoyed tinkering with the code and personalizing the game to their liking.
Among several others, Doodle Jump is the last game-lesson that I'll showcase on this page. In particular, in this lesson, students had to learn the basics of how gravity and acceleration work. Even though students were often only in 7th, 8th, or 9th grade, I found that they enjoyed learning these challenging concepts precisely because they didn't know that the concepts were supposed to be challenging. I enjoyed teaching them these concepts because I had only learned them recently at the time in a basic physics class.
Garrett Smith
Learning how to improvise better on guitar/bass 🎸 and keyboard/synth 🎹