[Actionchix] Idea for an actionchix project

[Mel Chua]

I would love to see this happen. Dunno if I'd be useful for much, as my 
work schedule is still up in the air, but I can at least volunteer as a 
guinea pig to test the module. I'm nineteen now and got into coding five 
years ago because of games; some friends (male) in high school wanted to 
write an RPG as a side project and asked me to do art for them and a 
little writing. I went from doing graphics to doing graphics and looking 
over their shoulders as they coded to asking questions as I watched to 
writing code with them looking over my shoulder and finally, years 
later, to programming on my own (with a lot of help from books and the 
internet).

There are "Make Your Own Video Games" books out there for beginning 
coders, but I haven't been very impressed by the ones I've seen - "Look, 
arrays! Make an array of aliens to shoot at." "Look, while loops! Make 
monsters attack you repeatedly." In order to write a really good 
how-to-make-games module for females, or anyone for that matter, we 
first need to make a game ourselves. I think the first step to this 
would be to get a group of (mostly female) designers of various coding 
experiences and ages together to actually create a game that's 
compelling for /both /genders - and then, as we create it, keep novice 
coders in mind (not that we can't do complicated things, but that 
simplicity in design is good and we need to explain any complicatedness 
from that point of view and not assume they can already do everything).

Ambitiously, I'm envisioning three interwoven parts to the module - 
first, our game/code, second the story/explanation of how we designed 
and developed it (think of it as comments for the code /and /the game), 
and finally a more general, non-example-tied, "So you want to make your 
own game?" section. The objective wouldn't be to teach programming per 
se - there are tons of good books for that - but it would be to show 
people what they can //do/ /with programming... I don't know about you, 
but I think more people will be interested by an "I can use a linked 
list to keep a dynamic to-do list updated on my desktop!" than a "Linked 
lists are such awesome abstract theoretical ideas and I can implement 
them in code!"

-Mel



Mary wrote:

> We canvassed various options on this list about projects to collaborate
> on a while back, and I was personally quite struck by Terri's
> suggestion:
>
> http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2004-October/000009.html
>
> In summary, the suggestion was to work on games projects. The part of it
> I particularly liked was the idea of developing educational resources
> around games programming: eg developing "how to write a game module"
> material aimed at women and girls, in addition to developing game
> modules and game module infrastructure, particularly infrastructure that
> makes it relatively easy (and therefore immediately rewarding) to
> develop your own games.
>
> Are people here interested in that project? Which parts? Any other
> ideas?
>
> -Mary
> _______________________________________________
> Actionchix mailing list
> Actionchix at linuxchix.org
> http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/actionchix
>  
>


Mary wrote:

> We canvassed various options on this list about projects to collaborate
> on a while back, and I was personally quite struck by Terri's
> suggestion:
>
> http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2004-October/000009.html
>
> In summary, the suggestion was to work on games projects. The part of it
> I particularly liked was the idea of developing educational resources
> around games programming: eg developing "how to write a game module"
> material aimed at women and girls, in addition to developing game
> modules and game module infrastructure, particularly infrastructure that
> makes it relatively easy (and therefore immediately rewarding) to
> develop your own games.
>
> Are people here interested in that project? Which parts? Any other
> ideas?
>
> -Mary
> _______________________________________________
> Actionchix mailing list
> Actionchix at linuxchix.org
> http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/actionchix
>  
>