D.I.Y. micro-games with Scratch!

The past two Wednesdays we had a program that I was really excited to finally try out at Sellers Library- making games with the Scratch programming language! Making games on a hobby and indie level has become increasingly popular, and there's more and more free and easy to use tools perfect for starting to try making your own games. For an entry level program, we used Scratch, which makes coding as easy as taking blocks of code and snapping them together.

The first Wednesday we had 11 teens show up. After a brief introduction to the Scratch program, they were each challenged to make a simple game consisting of a maze, a character the player can control and a goal to reach. It should be noted that we had some technical difficulties and some computers were having troubles connecting to the internet, meaning all the graphics had to be drawn with the simple paint program included instead of simply grabbing some graphics from the included library. We pressed on though, and each person made wildly different versions of a maze game! I'm including a lot of them below, and they are as-is, so some have problems with collision detection or movement, but one of the fun aspects of Scratch is that anyone can "remix" a shared project, so anyone is welcome to make a copy and add their own touches to it! It will even show up on the original project's page, by clicking the "tree" icon (to see the other projects branching out).

The second Wednesday session was a little smaller with 7 teens. This time the challenge was to take a project that had already been started, in this case a simple Pong clone, and play it a bit. As they were playing, I asked them to call out impressions about the game, or ideas to improve it. Lots of ideas were put forth, such as adding a second player, adding a scoring system, having the ball speed up as you played or adding background music. We then spent time getting some of these items added in, and then the remainder of the session was spent adding or changing whatever they wanted. Once again some ideas worked more than others, or sometimes just adding in something random did something crazy, and there might not have been enough time left to get things working again, but I'm including these as-is to be tinkered with additionally.

Click through the break below to see the embedded games. (I'm putting them below a page break to reduce loading times on the main page!)

Nintendo Night and Super Smash Bros!

Last Friday night we had 28 teens come to the library for Nintendo Night! Of them, 22 signed up to compete in our first Super Smash Bros for Wii U tournament. It was a noisy, fierce competition, and in the end Sarah came in first with Roy, winning a Hyrule map puzzle and a $25 gift card to Gamestop! Alex was really feeling it with Shulk and came in second place, and Aaron took home third (also with Shulk!).

When people weren't competing, we had multiple TVs set up with older Nintendo systems. Duck Hunt was getting a lot of play on the old NES! One table started just drawing a lot too, which was really cool! It was a really great night and we had a lot of fun! Our next gaming tournament will be for Pokemon at the Municipal Library on July 7.

Summer Reading Club!

We're a week into this year's Summer Reading Club, and I just wanted to take a moment and point out that if you go to our website's teen page, you can fill out an online form instead of doing the paper one that we hand out at the library. Either way you want to do it is up to you, but don't forget that for every five books you read you'll get a prize, a free book off our cart. You'll also be entered into the weekly prize giveaway! The Upper Darby Library teen page is linked below:

http://www.udlibraries.org/teen

Read comics, books, magazines, manga, whatever you want to read!  And don't forget that next week we'll have back to back craft programs at Sellers and Municipal Libraries! Next Tueday, the 30th, we'll be doing Perler Beads at Municpal at 3:00. Then on Wednesday we'll be making superhero necklaces from Shrinky Dinks! Both programs are drop-ins, so stop on by!

The Summer Schedule 2015!

Summer will be here before you know it! And we'll have lots of activities going on at the library for everyone! Below you can find the front and back image of the Summer schedule pamphlet that's now available! Click on them for the full-size image.