Recently, Bean Creative (and I, personally) had the pleasure of hosting a local Girl Scout troop in our studio after hours to talk about what we do, and how we do our work. The main focus of the meet-up was how we build apps, but I was sure to include a little push for HTML5 in the mix.
The night began with a little look at the Bean workspace. The girls got hung up on the foosball table for some time, so we had a little delay. Eventually, using crowbars, we were able to pry them away. We talked about the creative process and the roles of people at an agency like Bean. Then we gathered in the conference room to follow the real steps of a single project.
We discussed the Weird Al Yankovic project “When I Grow Up” and how it went from static book to interactive app. I started by showing them our initial pitch document, which had images of the corresponding children’s book, then we moved on to a more refined document discussing what the app could do. I had plans to show the them voiceover script and play them some of those recordings, but I could see eyes were glazing, so we skipped ahead. The girls then got to play one of the games from the app that was only basically defined in the initial doc, a game named Gorilla Masseuse. There was a lot of laughing and cheering on of friends, so I think they liked it. A few got the gorilla to happily go to sleep, while many others suffered through the “Gorilla Rampage!”
Next, I showed them the Scratch project from MIT. We tinkered with the coding options briefly, and I told them that the real power was from loops and events. We then jumped to the Javascript code for one of Bean’s recent HTML5 project, Pilot Pals for the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum. There, we identified loops in the code that were very similar to the ones in MIT’s visual Scratch interface.
Perhaps most importantly, we touched upon the “Hour of Code,” and probably more importantly, their lesson based around the movie “Frozen.” I suspect several girls got a kick out of trying this out afterward.
Finally, we ended with some questions. Did they ask about “Angry Birds”? Well, of course they did. But I think we then recognized that “Angry Birds” was really just something that emulated real-life physics to produce an easy-to-understand game. And we talked about how easily they themselves could recreate something like that.
We ended with a little game play time and some questions. And thankfully the troop leader didn’t let on where the girls were going next: for ice cream. While I think I had their interest for the hour we were together, I am sure ice cream would’ve trumped Javascript.
