Digital Technologies: Reflection

Hi there!

Today I will be reflecting on my time in Digital Technologies. 

What have I learnt?

I have learnt a lot in Digital Tech. I enjoyed learning about:

• How code works
• Developing my ideas
• Adding graphics to an app
• Working together with a team 

I enjoyed learning about how code works as I had never really learnt about it previously and it was one of the reasons I decided to take Digital Technologies. It was really interesting dabbling in coding as I had never done anything like that before. I found it challenging at first but it got easier as I went, I also used tutorials to help me out while I did this. One of my favourite activities with code in this semester was right at the beginning, we went onto a website and got to play games and code them along the way. This surprised me as I thought coding was quite difficult and could only be done in one way, however, I was wrong. I got to code my using blocks which I found a lot easy as a beginner. Also being able to play get past levels for doing code correctly was a lot more rewarding than I thought it would be, I played/coded some of these games in my own time too because I really enjoyed it. I was a bit surprised finding out that there are different websites/platforms to create games and apps, to be honest, I thought that there was just one way to do it but I got to try using three different platforms during my time in Digital Technologies, Gamefroot, App.Org & MIT App Inventor.

When making my game in the first half of the semester, we all followed a tutorial as to how to make a game. I chose to make an interactive story instead of a regular game. I wanted to do an interactive story as one of our tasks during this tutorial was to make a slideshow that was an interactive story. My story was about a nighttime zoo expedition, I chose this as I had watched 'Night at the Museum' a couple of nights before. We had to create two pathways with links to other slides, for example:

"You hear a rustling noise coming from your left, will you ignore it or will you go see what it is?" Then, we would link all the slides to the one which correctly matched, if you chose to see what the rustling noise was the link that you would press would take you to a slide titled as 'You chose to see what the rustling noise was' and your story would carry on. To come up with these ideas I made a table with a column with possible characters, the setting and the plot. Making this table really helped me develop my ideas, keep track of them and decide what I wanted to do. 

I also used this process when developing an app with a team, we discussed what we wanted our app to include, we then recorded all of our ideas and added more onto a brainstorming page that we made, we ended up with a lot of ideas!

In my team for making an app, I was the person who was in charge of creating our app logo. I researched what would make a logo stand out while another teammate researched what platform would be the best to do this on. We ended up going for a purple colour scheme, our logo faded from dark purple to a very light purple which looked really cool. We ended up doing this on a website called 'FreeLogoDesign.Org'.

As I hadn't worked in a group with someone when creating a game, I enjoyed being in a team when making an app. We agreed between ourselves that we would have two people working on coding the app and two people who did the graphics and any other jobs that we needed to do. This plan worked well for us, no one person had a bunch of work to do, it was all distributed evenly throughout all of the group. We all communicated well with each other and had a lot of fun doing it too. 

What did I like?

I liked being able to choose who I worked with and what I wanted to make. I found while creating an app that I had a lot of freedom over what I wanted to make, I really enjoyed getting to make the app like an app that I would like to play. When I worked in a group, I liked getting to hear others' opinions and what they would like in an app and what they wouldn't like in an app as everyone has different needs and wants. I also liked being able to talk to my teacher because he was very helpful and funny!

What did I dislike?

There wasn't anything that I disliked in this semester of Digital Technologies, however in the beginning of the semester I felt a bit out of place as it seemed as everyone else already knew quite a fair bit about coding whereas I really had no clue. One other thing was that I was the only girl in my class, so I didn't really have any friends which were girls. I overcame this because I already knew some of the people in my class. 

Overall?

Overall, I have really enjoyed doing Digital Technologies this semester! I may have felt out of place in the beginning but after a little while I felt like I clicked in place. Making a game was a lot of fun and getting to work with others while making an app were both great experiences. 

Thanks for reading!