The Twice Exceptional class has been hard at work building their app over the past few months. Students have been working using the YouthDigital online course and professional software suite, Clickteam Fusion 2, to program the basic function of the game.  This included programming in rules for collisions, a life counter, and programming the path for a moving obstacle. Now meeting once per week, the class has finished the fundamental design of the game—including the background, sound effects and physics. The point of the game is to defeat all the red enemies by carefully launching the blue hero character from the left of the screen.

AppAs simple as that sounds, it took a lot of hard work by our Twice Exceptional students to program this basic function behind the scenes.  Pictured above is what the frame editor generally looks like, showing a picture of what happens on screen.

Behind the scenes, however, is the event editor, where all the rules of the app must be programmed in:


Using a graphical interface seen above, students have programmed the function of the app using a series of if-then statements, such as “If hero collides with enemy then enemy is destroyed.”  Or, “if hero leaves the play area, then hero is destroyed and 1 life is subtracted.” The class is now working to program the game so that the character’s movement speed is based off of the swipe distance of the player’s finger.

Twice Exceptional Lead Teacher Adam Maturo shared,

I am happy to report great successes in learning the craft of app design…. For the class, it has been an eye opening experience to see the systems that underpin the kinds of games that they play on a regular basis.  In my view, it has given the students in the Twice Exceptional class a new appreciation of application development and has energized their creativity.  We look forward to showing off more progress in the weeks and months to come.

Moving forward, the class will begin to work on creating a menu, level select, and a number of challenging levels of their own design. We are excited to see how this project progresses!