GamesCon Aberdeenshire 2019/2020
The task for this session’s GamesCon competition is organized around the 5Rights Framework: Making the Digital Environment Fit for Children and Childhood. In Teams of 4 students will create a software solution to the task below.
Secondary Schools
The theme remains the same: to learn about and promote the 5Rights. However this could be developed from a Scratch programming environment to creating a mobile app. A good site is appsforgood.org (https://www.appsforgood.org/), where a teacher can sign-up and has access to a wealth of lesson plans that will guide students through to creating a mobile app. The benefit of using Apps for Good, is that the students could also enter the National Apps for Good competition in addition to the GamesCon. The secondary competition is open to pupils in S1 – S3, and these youngsters could be mentored by senior pupils throughout the development of the project.
Support and Guidance
The choice of software and hardware is left to the school and the young people, so they could carry on developing a solution in Scratch or use any other software / hardware environment they are comfortable with.
CodeClub.org (https://www.codeclub.org.uk/) provides easy-to-use templates for teachers and pupils to use and there is a simple set-up for the school. Codeclub.org.uk have full details of how to set up a code club. These are in place in many of our schools. For schools where a code club is not running but who would be keen to consider forming one, Code Club provides all of the advice and support required. It is very straightforward. Most Code Clubs meet once a week, at lunchtime or after school, for around 30 minutes.
Teams
A team will be made up of 4 students and preferably from a mix of year groups.
All work should be extra curricular, ie lunchtime or before/after school club or meetings
Practical consideration for the Final at RGU
The teams will be required to perform a 5 minute presentation to judges, this will be entirely on the project, not on the personnel involved.
The teams will be expected to have a complete paper/digital documentation trail, and for example this will include meetings where ideas were generated, timelines, user and technical documentation, presentations and advertising or promotional material, with the latter preferably digital (movie or animation). The judges will want to see this record of the project , so it may be an idea to video meetings, prototypes, final product and edit these as required. This part of the project will account for 50% of marks available.
Presentations
You will be allocated about 2 hours to set up and perform final checks on your software and hardware and during this time judges will be around and will take an interest in what you are doing and may ask questions.
The teams will be allocated time to present to the judges , the presentation will include a working demonstration of the project tackled. They will listen to your presentation, and you will all be available to answer any questions.
The top three entries will be chosen and each team will then present to all of the pupils, primary and secondary, and at the end of the three presentations the pupils will vote for a winner.
