Currently in its first year, under the charge of Mr. Beaver, Game Programming is the newest offering of the DHS CTE programs. 

Q: What’s a general description of the class?

B: “I like to think of the class as a set of tools for students to build video games with.”

Q: What are some skills that you hope your students are going to take away from this

class?

B: “Attention to detail, critical thinking, problem-solving, and I put a really big emphasis

on social interaction in this class.”

Two of the leading students in the class are Nikolas Espinoza, 9, and Elizabeth Cortez, 11.

Here’s what they had to say about the course.

Q: How would you describe your overall experience here?

N: “I would describe [my experience] as very good for me. I’ve been trying to get into

coding, specifically for game development, so with this course, it’s made it really easy to

understand it better than self-teaching. Also, the lessons are explained well and we are given

slides on most, if not all code that we learn, which makes it way easier to understand.”

Q: What is something interesting and helpful that you have learned?

N: “I would say how to do simple movements in games that many people think are easy

to make. Double jumping is in lots of fantasy games. It may seem like it is easy to make, I mean

it’s only jumping twice, but in reality, it takes a good amount of lines of code to make it happen.”

Q: What are some of the things you do in this class?

E: “On a daily basis in the game programming class, we learn a new concept in

programming and then are given challenges to complete that teach us to think differently and

critically in order to complete the task. These daily challenges help us to become better

programmers by expanding our knowledge of the programming language and our ability to be

better analyzers.”

Q: Why did you think of taking this class?

E: “I signed up for this game programming class because it was something new that I

had never tried before, and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. I grew up loving to

watch my older brother play video games. Although I’ve never been too big of a gamer, I

loved the way the games looked and was so intrigued as to how they worked. I’ve seen video

games bring together anyone of any age, and I thought it would be fun to make something like

that.”