anonymous_user_d2c79ab9:
I’d love to teach Unreal Blueprints in my CS Principles course next year. That sounds amazingly cool! I’m not very familiar with it yet, but am prepared to put some work in if it fits with the course.
What do you think, could students learn all the major computer science principles by using Blueprints? Loops, Lists, etc, without it seeming overly contrived?
This will be for Computer Science Principles. This is a program agnostic course, that just requires the language teaches them… well, the principles! Block coding programs like Scratch and MIT App Inventor are rather common for final projects. While plenty of classes use Java and Python too, there’s no penalty of block coding.
Would Unreal Blueprints be sufficiently accessible and provide the programming reasoning opportunities?
I’ve also considered PyGame, but that program isn’t as exciting or provide as much ‘bang for your buck’ when it comes to programming time.
I’ve also considered Unity with C#, but I get the sense that the non-C# portion of Unity wouldn’t build programming skills much, and it would take too long to get into the programming reasoning with C#, but I could be judging or viewing it wrong.
Unreal’s Blueprints on the other hand… seemed like a bit like a Block Coding dream for students interested in game design. I know not every student will be interested in game design, so I will also be doing the MIT App Inventor curriculum in tandem with this one, so students have a choice! Other options will likely be available to, at least for the self-sufficient or motivated students.
Thanks so much for your help! I’m hoping this is an excellent fit!
I’d say the main problem with teaching them via BP is that it’s not really applicable to ‘real life’ unless they want ot do something in gaming.
There’s also some ways in which BPs don’t act like normal code, for instance loops often don’t wait for the exec pin to run before calling the next itteration.
Apart from that, great
