High School Hackers

~Facebook group

Check out this latest hot iOS game, "Impossible Rush", which for those of you who've taken my Scratch 2.0 and App Inventor classes, know not too tough to build yourself! On Scratch, you'd build a custom sprite (rectangle outline in the graphics editor, then paint it with 4 different colors using the brush tool), then, add event handler "when this sprite is clicked", turn 90 degrees. The second part is adding a ball that drops down that changes to one of the 4 colors at random intervals (I have some snippets of this action in several projects in my SEP Scratch 2.0 studio), building score and high score variables that give a point when the color of the falling ball touches the matching color of the turning sprite. That simple! A bit trickier in App Inventor, since you'd need each character to represent a color in the turning sprite, since that platform doesn't handle "color" detection the same way as Scratch does, so probably you'd need to modify the game design a bit, maybe adding different color squares you'd launch to "catch" the falling ball ("fling" + "collision" programming) depending on the falling ball's color.

Impressive, given the inventors are 2 high school kids who collaborated on social media to plan, design and launch this game currently #16 of top free game apps downloaded in US.

I always like to teach animation programming using current hot games, so I'll work this week to come up with a way to create Impossible Rush in Kodu to experiment with in my next 3D animation SEP lesson plan. I'll post our results here, so stay tuned ...