*CREATING*

Most of the lessons are spent with the students trying to code what they had imagined when planning their game. Sometimes students would talk to each other about problems, especially if their characters had similar movements.

For example, let us imagine a game which involves a sprite trying to dodge a ball. The sprite could be a person, another ball, a character...... basically anything! Sharing ideas helped spark creativity. During one class, the mentors taught one student how to code a collision and as a result this student taught another student, who taught another student. Through collaboration and sharing, mentors and students helped each other learn until everybody who needed this piece of code received it. It was really great to see the students teaching each other, which also allowed us to help the other students who needed it.

Sometimes, as mentors we would have multiple students needing help at one time. We can now imagine what it is like to be a teacher! It was easy for the students to get distracted when we would spend a little longer than expected helping others. If this happens to you, then just let them have a break for 5 minutes and remind the students to start working again. Giving breaks seemed to help engage the students more than forcing them to work. Students who felt forced to work would try and sneak in an online game or two, which led to distractions. In short, it is important to find the balance between learning and fun.

There were also times when students asked questions I didn't know the answer too. Don't worry if this happens - it is great to model to the students how to find answers. As mentors, we would model where to look online for answers and tell them that we would have to get back to them with that answer. There were a few times we would go home and figure out the questions to help answer the students questions. Teaching students to create apps helped increase our skills as well!