People Playing Google Pac-Man Wastes 4.8 Million Hours
The 30th anniversary of Pac-Man has come and gone. What a cool game!
I remember playing Pac-Man on 25 cent arcade machines when I was a kid.
We had a local arcade / pizza house that all sorts of video games.
We had Space Invaders, Frogger, Galaga, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Phoenix, and Asteroids just to name a few.
Due to my fond feelings about arcade games and my perception that my students like them as well, I have my students complete several of these games in my classes.
I have a GridWorld Snake Project that can easily become PacMan.
I also have Space Invaders and Pong projects using Frames and Java Graphics.
I ported over my Pong project over to Scratch and use that in our intro CS class.
We also created Pac-Man in XNA / C# as an end of year project. The students had to research grid-based gaming and the A* algorithm. The project was fun.
My students love building interactive projects and really enjoying playing what they create as well as playing what others in class create.
It is very educational for the students to design and build a game and then explain that creative process to other students.