The Jozi Book Fair Festival (JBF) held a skill workshop on Games programming on your phone & language of programming at African Museum on the 4th floor West 2. The skill workshop took place from the 29 to 30 August 2019 for the school programme.
About 35 learners from different schools attended the Games programming on your phone & language of programming skill workshop. The aim of the workshop is to teach learners how to build simple games on their phone and to understand programming in simple spoken language that they use on a daily basis. Also to use efficiently the platform of open source as the working class children are the ones that faces the challenges of accessing the use of technology.
The app used is called Pocket Code it’s an app for smartphones and tablets. It allows you to develop games and animations directly on your phone, by simply sticking bricks together those bricks are form of drag and drop and written in normal spoken language. Pocket Code is available for free at Google Play. Through this app they created a game call Bird. The aim of the game was that when the bird fly’s should be tapped and produce a different sound all the time.
This workshop introduce learner to the world of technology which has fewer people who are doing it. The game development industry is growing in South Africa. The world of video game design is not for those who simply love to play video games. It encourage learners to study science, mathematics and computer programming, which South Africa struggles in those subjects/majors.
