Supplemental Lessons

imageSupplemental Lessons
Unit Overview

NOTE: These supplemental activities include ideas and instructions for frequently requested game elements (Using Ninja Cat as a template), but feel free to have your students get creative with their additions! Students will deepen their understanding of various concepts, either through continued practice and review, or encountering more complicated material (nested structures).

Product Outcomes:
  • Students will use nested structures to add complexity to their games

Standards and Evidence Statements:

Standards with prefix BS are specific to Bootstrap; others are from the Common Core. Mouse over each standard to see its corresponding evidence statements. Our Standards Document shows which units cover each standard.

    Length: 65 minutes

    Materials:
    • Computers with students’ complete Ninja Cat games preloaded

    Preparation:

      Types

      Functions


      Scoring and Levels

      Overview

      Students learn how to add a scoring system and levels to their game

      Learning Objectives

        Evidence Statements

          Product Outcomes

            Materials

            • Computers with students’ complete Ninja Cat games preloaded

            Preparation

            Scoring and Levels (Time 35 minutes)

            • Your version of Ninja Cat is just as complex as the original game, but there’s not a lot of variety. The player avoids the dog and gets the coin over and over again. We should mix things up a bit: how about adding new levels? Typically a game would progress to a new level if the player has reached a certain goal: Collected a certain number of coins, destroyed a certain number of zombies, or reached a certain score. Let’s start by adding a scoring system to the Ninja World game.

              Both the scoring system and randomizing the y-coordinates of the target and danger were part of the included teachpack in Bootstrap:1, code which ran "under the hood" in students’ first Bootstrap game. Let them know that in Bootstrap:2, they no longer need this hidden code, because they’ve learned enough to program the entire game (and more!) themselves.

            • The score is something that will be changing in the game, so you can be sure that it has to be added to the World structure.
              • What data type is the score? Number, String, Image, or Boolean?

              • What will be the score in the worldA (the starting world)?

              • Change the World structure of your Ninja Cat game so it includes a score.

                Remember: Since the World structure is changing, you now have to go through your game code- every time you make a world, the score must be included in that world.

              How do you get the score out of the world?

            • Now that the game has a score, it needs to be able to increase or decrease. For Ninja Cat, we’ll say that the score should go up by 30 points when Ninja Cat collides with the coin, and down by 20 points when colliding with the dog.
              • Which of the ask branches in next-world checks these conditions?

              • How would you decrease the score by 20 if the player collides with the dog?

               

              On the next ask branch, make the score increase by 30 points when the cat collides with the coin.

            • The scoring system is in place, but how will the player know what their score is? You’ll need to display the score on the game screen.

              Which function handles how the world is drawn?

              In draw-world, images are placed onto the background using put-image to draw the game. But the score is represented by a Number: we need a way to represent it as an Image. Thankfully, Pyret has some built-in functions that can help with this: the function num-to-string takes in a Number for its domain and returns a String representation of that number. This string can then be passed to the text function to return an Image that can then be used in draw-world.

              Copy the following contracts into your workbook:

              • num-to-string : Number -> String

              • text : String, Number, String -> Image

              • How would you use the num-to-string and text functions together to draw the score into the world?

              • How do you get the score out of the world?

              • How large should the text of the score be? Where should it be placed on your game scene?

              The expression:   will place the score (drawn in size 30 purple text) onto the center of the BACKGROUND-IMG.

            • Ninja World has a visible scoring system: Now it’s time to add some levels. For this example, you’ll make the game have a different background image when the player progresses to the next level. We’ll say that the player will reach level two when his or her score is greater than 250.

              Where do you define the BACKGROUND-IMG image? Keep the original background for the first level, but define a new variable, BACKGROUND2-IMG, that will be used for level 2. For the best results, use an image that is the same size as your original background.

              Now that you have another background image, it needs to be drawn into the game- but only when a certain condition is met.
              • What must be true for the player to progress to level 2 in the game?

              • Which function handles the way the game looks?

              • What is the only thing different in level 2 of Ninja Cat?

            • The only thing that changes at level 2 is the way the game looks: specifically, the background image. Because the background only changes when a certain condition is met, you’ll need to change the draw-world function so that it uses ask. Leave the current code alone for now and start right under fun draw-world(current-world):.
              • What is the first thing to write, to let the computer know that this will be a function with different conditions?

              • What is the first condition to check? (Hint: is the score large enough to progress to level 2?)

               

              If this test evaluates to true, the result will look very similar to the code you already have for draw-world, starting with put-image.

              What is the one thing that needs to change?

              Instead of putting all your images on top of BACKGROUND-IMG, you’ll put them over BACKGROUND2-IMG, your new background image:  

            • Don’t forget to add an otherwise clause before your original code, right underneath what you just wrote. If the score is not greater than 250, the world will be drawn with the images on the original background.

               

              Now your Ninja Cat game has a level 2! You can use the same process to add more levels when the score gets even higher. Maybe instead of the background changing, you want the player to transform, or make the game more difficult by making the dog move faster.

              Some more options for students who finish early:

              • Change the next-world function so that the dog and coin move faster if the score is greater than 500.

              • Use the text function to display a game over message on the screen when the score drops below 0.

              • Change the images of all the game characters when the player progresses to the next level.

              • Challenge: Instead of writing similar code in draw-world over and over for each level, use abstraction: write a function that takes in the background image, and returns the game images placed on top of the given background. This function can then be called within draw-world with the appropriate background image when the player reaches each level.

            Nested Structures

            Overview

            Students reinforce their understanding of structures as they are used in their games

            Learning Objectives

              Evidence Statements

                Product Outcomes

                • Students will use nested structures to add complexity to their games

                Materials

                  Preparation

                    Nested Structures (Time 30 minutes)

                    • Now that you know about data structures and how to use them, you can make video games that are even more complex. For example, you could make a game with many different characters by making each character their own data structure. For example:  

                      Define a character struct and some example characters for your own game. They don’t have to follow the same pattern- your characters can have a health property instead of a speed, for example. Just be sure your newly defined characters have the same properties as the character structure you define.

                    • If each character is now its own structure, what would your world look like? Something like:  

                      Why is it important to use variable names (c1, c2, and c3) instead of just defining the World struct to include specific characters (DOG, CAT, COIN)?

                      Variables are used in structs for the same reason variables are used in functions: we want to be able to change the value of those characters later. When you define the first world, you can then make your predefined character structs part of that world: worldA = world(DOG, CAT, COIN) Of course, you need some way to access parts of each character structure, even if it’s inside another structure. This is just like accessing any part of a structure: with dot-accessors.
                      • How do you get the first character out of the starting world?

                      • What will that expression evaluate to?

                      • How would you get the speed out of the resulting character?

                      • worldA.c1.speed

                      For even more of a challenge, every level in the game can be its own structure. A level could have a background image, characters, a boolean value representing wheather the player has collided with another character, or anything you like!

                      Using many nested structures can get tricky: if a student is struggling, have them draw the circles of evaluation for their expressions.