Today I was a judge at the first Kudo Kup at West of Scotland College in Paisley, hosted by David Renton, Curriculum and Quality leader for Computing. The Kudo Kup is a global competition that Microsoft has rolled out to commemorate the full release of Kudo on the PC.
The UK final will be at Microsoft UK HQ in Reading and the winning team from Scotland will gain a place in that final. Next year, the competition will expand further with a European final, with the contestants having their transport paid for them by Microsoft.
Kodu is a visual programming language made specifically for creating games and is designed to be accessible for children. The competition today saw school students aged 7 to 14. So my expectations were not high as to the calibre of games that would be on show, but I was very wrong.
The winners were a group of 7 year olds who had designed a maze game, which contained a tutorial, had the ability to collect stars in order to help navigate the maze and also programmed the maze walls themselves to change colour to indicate progress. It was very well thought out and superbly designed. I came away thinking that college level students couldn’t do much better. Other games worth noting were; a zombie apocalypse game, a commonwealth tribute and a very scary haunted house survival game.
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