Wednesday 8 May 2013

The Future is already here..

I had the pleasure of being asked to be one of the judges at Chelmsford Makerspace's #CMJam Game Jam last weekend.  The Game Jam was a 72 hour (ish) codeathon where the participants had to program an original computer game (or mod to an existing engine) whilst incarcerated in the concrete walls of the Ideas Hub community space in Chelmsford, Essex.

Of course, plenty of Pizza and Coke was available to feed the hungry minds and stomachs of the attendees.  We ended up with six teams, and each showed off a surprisingly complete game, especially Makerspace Co-founder Ben Orrin who wrote a particulary addictive HTML5 platformer in an impressive 140-odd lines of code!

All the entrants were young men, I believe all under the age of 18, and none of them had learnt any coding in school, in fact all of them were essentially self taught, or taught by their peers at the Makerspace or online.  Producing a video game was of course a good motivator for them as they were all avid gamers, but the interesting thing was that these young, talented coders were unhappy with just playing games, and were driven to create their own. As I said, the standard was very high, and judging was tough with only five points separating the top four entrants.  Everyone came away with a prize, with the top prize being a Raspberry Pi which will hopefully get warm as the winner compiles their game onto it!

With fear and trepidation evident from some (many) UK teachers about having to teach coding in the National Curriculum, I sat there thinking that there were plenty of budding Computing teachers sitting in the room, presenting their wares in a confident and compelling manner.  I think I learnt more about coding from some of the CMJammers than I had in the last ten years!

Ben Orrin and Richard Raybould from Chelmsford Makerspace and Leonie Ramondt from the Ideas Hub Chelmsford