High School Computer Science Club Hosts Game Jam

Throughout the 2023-24 school year, the Computer Science Club at Whitesboro High School has focused on video game development. Each meeting, they would work through broken code for a classic arcade or mobile game, trying to fix it to make the game playable. Through that process they learned a lot about computer science and video game design principles.

As a culminating activity, the club hosted their own “game jam.” A game jam is an event in which participants are given a theme prompt and then must create a video game from scratch in a given time window. Students came together on a Saturday and had six hours to build a working video game around the central theme, “The More You Have, The Worse It Is.”

Students broke off into teams where they collaborated on ideas and brainstormed to create a rough outline of their gameplay, story, level design and characters. Then they got to collecting and creating their assets for images and animations. Lastly, students worked together to actually code their own games!

The final products included games such as “Caffeine Rush,” a game where if you drink too much coffee you get overcome with the jitters; “Skelly’s Mission: Green Slom Mitosis,” a game where a skeleton has to fight off evil cells that are undergoing mitosis; and “Population Decimation,” a game where you have to try to minimize the negative effects of overpopulating a small town.

Overall, it was a great event and experience for students and they can’t wait to do it again next year!