How Long Does It Take to Make a Fun Game? Not as Long as You Might Think

Have you walked past our coffee shop in Tin Hau lately? Have you competed with other players for the top spot on a leaderboard?

Small projects like this show that children can build something playable with the right tools. Keep the scope small at first so learners can finish, test and improve their work.

Back in April, Nathaniel and Edison were invited to take part in the Easter Special project — recreating the classic easter egg game hidden in Chrome browser — “T-Rex Runner”.

Originally a single-player game, Nathaniel and Edison from Coding enhanced the code and turned it into a 2-player game. The world exclusive edition of the T-Rex Runner game was later built into an actual arcade game console and put out at Coffee for visitors to play. The whole project was to show that programming can empower anyone — even kids — to do something great.

That’s pretty much the level of impact we’d love an App Inventor student to achieve.

Who would have guessed that a game coded by two young kids would end up being showcased at one of the biggest developer summits in the world, the MIT App Inventor Summit 2019?

Held by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) right on their campus in Cambridge, MA, the team was honored to be invited as a distinguished educator to host an educator workshop, as well as showcasing our T-Rex Runner project to the top technologists from all over the world.

During the summit, our team shared the experience of building the T-Rex Runner console. Since the standard package of App Inventor does not offer an easy way for users to connect an app to an external controller, the Team, however, made use of a keyboard extension that developer can connect the control panel of the app to a set of external hardware keys with which you can perform different controls. That’s the mechanism of the big arcade button for controlling the T-Rex to jump over the cacti and other hurdles.