Last Week of April

This week we had to make a comercial for a Food Bank worksheet. We had a lot of fun making it. We also worked on our games and team pages. Had a good week.

Civics Engagement Blog 4/22

The hardest thing to teach in our game is the different types of governments and how they differ. We have created many questions and games to show how there are different types of governments in different areas of the world. We believe that we have taught this successfully and that people will learn about government.

4/12/10-4/16/10

This week we have worked on our Team Pages and presentations. We needed to do a little tweaking on our Team Page. It wasn't anything major, but it needed to be completed. We updated our presentations for our games. Just made it a little more informative to the viewer and more about our new ideas on our game.

Globaloria 4/14/10

Information can be altered in many ways to make sure that no one is copyrighting. The news does this all the time. There are so many different news stations that they can't all say the same information about the same stories. In the kids games, many people will talk about the same things, but they will all tweak it in their own ways.

March 31, 2010 Blog Prompt

This week I took a look at the Team Tigers from SRMS. Their paperprototype looks very creative. It will be difficult to complete as planned, but I have the up-most confidence in their ability. The game isn't completed. It is a demo so I'll give them that. With some more work, this game will look great. Keep up the good work.

Function 3/25/10

Select one team game or game idea in your knowledge community that you feel will do an effective job teaching players about civic function. List the selected team's school, name and game title. Describe specifically what the game aims to teach and why its design plan or game demo succeeds in achieving this aim. Please write a minimum of 4 sentences.
Greenbrier East High School,The Cheese Wizards, the three branches game helps understand the billing process within the government. Their first question shows the way a bill is processed. The second question does a good job of showing how a bill gets passed by a majority vote.

March 19 Weekly blog

This week we looked at this STEM game competition. I guess we aren't allowed to do it because we are doing the Globaloria competition. Other than that we worked on some of our games and our individual games. Not a bad week.

March 18, 2010 Function Prompt

In our game demo, you will find a mini game that has books flying at a picture of Hitler. This is showing the freedoms he took away from the people in Europe. We worked together in finding the information for the freedoms and we thought of it together due to the question before it. It has to deal with Hitler's type of government and freedoms of the people.

3/8/10-3/12/10

This week has been pretty okay. We have finished our games for the most part and they look great. We have had some help from Globaloria. They told us some things that we could do to make it better. Thanks for your time!

Function Assignment

What are the different duties of the Presidential cabinet (specifically, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General)? How are these people appointed, and what influence does the voting public have over them?
The Secretary of State appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate.
The Secretary of the Treasury appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate.
The Secretary of Defense is appointed the President with the approval of the Senate. Also, they are member of the Cabinet.
The Attorney General is appointed the Central People's Government in on the advice of the Chief Executive.
The public have a huge influence on how and who is elected. They are allowed to vote for who they believe is the best for the job.

Function Game

Hello. My name is Andy and my teammates name is Aaron. We are in 12th grade and we have started a game on the different types of government. Our team was formed by a long time friendship. Also, our game has to do with how the types of government work. If you would like to try our game here is the URL, http://www.myglife.org/usa/wv/shhswiki/index.php/Team:A-Team2. After looking at the Function Resource page, we know that our game fits very well into the Function area and the Ideals Knowledge Framework. The government based trivia game is a useful way to learn about government. Thank you all and good luck!

CS3 Catagories

***Naming conventions - You will usually use about 80% of your time troubleshooting, debugging, and performing maintenance on your game.

**General naming guidelines - Use upper and lower case letters to distinguish names of items.

**Avoiding reserved words and language constructs - Don't use reserved words because it can cause an error.

**Naming variables - Start variables with a lowercase letter.
Names with capital first letters are reserved for classes, interfaces, and so on.

**Naming constants - Variables should be lowercase or mixed-case letters.

**Naming Boolean variables - Start Boolean variables with the word "is".

**Naming functions and methods - Name methods as verbs.

**Naming classes and objects - Use meaningful and simple names that are descriptive of the class contents. To avoid being vague or misleading, use generic names.

**Naming packages - Put the prefix for a package name in all lowercase letters.

**Naming interfaces - Interface names are usually adjectives.

**Naming custom components - Components that do not use concatenated words begin with an uppercase letter.

***Using comments in your code - Comments document the decisions you make in the code.

**Writing good comments - Use block comments (/* and */) for multiline comments and single-line comments ( // ) for short comments.

**Adding comments to classes - The two kinds of comments in a typical class or interface file are documentation comments and implementation comments.

***ActionScript and Flash Player optimization - No case sensitivity is involved with the code, only Flash Player.

***ActionScript coding conventions - Consistency is one of the most important aspects of programming.

**Keeping your ActionScript code in one place - Code is easy to find in a potentially complex source file.

**Attaching code to objects - ActionScript code that is attached to objects encourages poor coding style.

**Handling scope - The global scope applies to all timelines and scopes within SWF files.

*About variables and scope - A variable's scope refers to the area in which the variable is known (defined) and can be referenced.

*About scope and targeting - The nested instance is known as the child instance.

*Understanding classes and scope - If you have a class method that uses a callback function (such as the LoadVars class's onLoad() method), it can be difficult to know whether the keyword refers to the class or to the LoadVars object.

**Structuring a class file - You create classes in separate ActionScript 2.0 files that are imported into a SWF file when you compile an application.

**About using functions - One way you can reuse code is by calling a function multiple times, instead of creating different code each time.

***Formatting ActionScript syntax - Formatting ActionScript 2.0 code in a standardized way is essential to writing maintainable code, and it's easier for other developers to understand and modify.

**General formatting guidelines - When you use spaces, line breaks, and tab indents to add white space to your code, you increase your code's readability.

**Writing conditional statements - Use braces ({}) for if statements.

**Writing compound statements - Compound statements contain a list of statements within braces ({}).

**Writing a for statement - You can write the for statement using the following format:

for (init; condition; update) {
// statements
}

**Writing while and do..while statements - You can write do-while statements using the following format:

do {
// statements
} while (condition);

**Writing return statements - Don't use parentheses [()] with any return statements that have values.

**Writing switch statements - All switch statements include a default case.

**Writing try..catch and try..catch..finally statements - Write try..catch and try..catch..finally statements using the following formats:

var myErr:Error;
// try..catch
try {
// statements
} catch (myErr) {
// statements
}

// try..catch..finally
try {
// statements
} catch (myErr) {
// statements
} finally {
// statements
}

**About using listener syntax - You can write listeners for events in several ways in Flash 8 and later.

1/25/10-1/29/10

I came back into this class a little late, but I have learned how to create a drag and drop game. We have been trying to make a few other games, but they had a few problems. We also did a little debugging that didn't work well. Other than that, I'm just ready to have another fun semester in here.

1/11/10-1/15/10

This week we recorded our game presentations> Globoria was supposed to be here, but they didn't...how lame. The videos went well, but it takes forever to upload. Its been a good week.

12/14-12/18 Questions

1.Have you completed any additional Civics Research for your games?
Yes. We have complete a lot of research while looking for questions for our game.

2.Have you changed your games, if so what educational value does the game possess?
Yes. Our game is more of a questionaire instead of a shooter.

3.What problems, if any did you encounter this week?
We have had many code problems, but other than that we haven't had many problems.