Gratefullness – November 2024

Games for Smartphones course in Week 3 with Stars

Gratefulness – November 2024

Hope IT finished two courses.  We summarize what happened below.  Thank you for your prayers.

Finished the Games on Smartphones course at Stars:

Stars has been in the Pasadena community for 20 years now, working with underprivileged children and families.  They are a natural partner for Hope IT, and we are blessed to partner with them.

As we mentioned in our last email, we started a 6 week course to create a game on smartphones.  The picture above shows the group in Week 3.  The picture at the end of this newsletter shows the game we created.  Below are the key highlights.

  • Students attendance
    • We fluctuated between 1 student to 6 students each week.
    • 4 students got certificates, making it at least 3 of the weeks.
    • We mostly had girls in the course..and one time..up to 5 girls.
  • We found a few smiles along the way 😉
    • We made our phones talk…say what we wanted it to say.
    • We built a complete game, where we navigate a marble between threats and targets.
    • We move the marble by tilting a phone and varying roll and pitch, just like as a fighter aircraft does flying through the air.  (Phones have all the required sensors built in.)  In the picture above, we use a space shuttle model to explain how the sensors detect roll and pitch.
  • Students encountered challenges:
    • Ironically the school-provided Chromebooks are so restricted as to not allow students access to MIT’s AppInventor website.  The students used the laptops we provided instead.
    • We got to encourage Math.  (That makes Hope IT smile.)  That is needed.  Students initially were not too enthusiastic, until they saw the role the math played in making the game work.
    • The students had to “repair” the game math: The marble moves on the X-Y axis, but it was going in the wrong direction, because the phone sensors were in the opposite direction.  Students had to identify the problem and fix it mathematically.  That was the hardest part of the course.  After that, students said it was not too hard.
    • Students had to correct the scale of the game with other mathematical modifications.  They directly experienced the mathematical structure of the game by playing the game.
  • Hope IT encountered challenges:
    • Hope IT had to provide laptops for the students to use, even test Google Accounts for them to log in, as well as a few times, borrowed phones to try out their changes to the project/game.
    • Hope IT had to create “catch-up” projects, so students that may have missed a previous lesson, could start on the topics for the new week.
    • When new students joined, Hope IT had to work to get that student up to speed (laptop, installing a phone app, and Google account access), so that took away from advancing the entire group together.  It worked out well….students were patient with us.  We are grateful.
  • Hope IT has not taught this course since 2019, so it was nice to dust off this course again.  We really liked teaching this course again, especially now that AppInventor works with iPhone, and most youth have iPhones.
    • This course explains real programming concepts like objects.
      • Properties: The X and Y location of the marble, or the color of the circles.
      • Methods: Make the phone talk using built in phone features.
      • Events: Detect when the marble collides with the green or red circles
      • Adjust coordinate systems to get desired directions and scale.
  • We covered key programming logic (see picture below to get the idea):
    • IF-THEN-ELSE:
      • If the Marble collides with the Green circle, then say “Great job”
      • Otherwise (it collides with a Red circle) gently let the player of your game to “Try again”.
    • Test your work!!!  Stop and figure out why the program is not working how we expected.  It always does what we told it, but what we told it is not what we meant.  We must rephrase what we want.
  • Our phones can do so much.  In a similar theme, we focused on how Jesus takes on so many qualities.  Our Scriptural reflections were on the “I am” statements of Jesus in the Gospel of John.  It is key to hear from Jesus himself, on who he is.  Two well known “I am” statements from Jesus are, “I am the bread of life”, and “I am the good shepherd.”

Recap of our “AI and Integrity” course:

From time to time, Hope IT creates new courses.  We created a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) course, focused on using AI chat bots like ChatGPT, by writing what are called “ai prompts”.  We offered the course in October, but due to difficulties our partners had to get students to sign up before the deadline, we had to revise the 4-week course to shortened 2-week course. We had 2 students from the Door of Hope.  We are grateful to try out our ideas for the new course.  Below are a few highlights.

  • This AI course had a different style, in that it was more of a collaboration, the group creating prompts and evaluating the AI responses, and then trying out new prompts together.  This allowed for a lot of discussion, pushing students to express what they thought was the right approach.  Some of the topics we covered were:
    • Should AI be censored?  Should an AI know your age?
    • What protections/limits should an AI have?  If you asked the AI to write a story of a plot of a person blowing up a car, and you need the plot to provide a lot of “real-life” details, should the AI just do what is asked to do?
  • Not all AI are built the same.  ChatGPT and PerplexityAI have different answers to the same prompt.
  • Not only did we cover text, but we had AI create graphics for us, create photos of minions in the city, with one of them floating in space, see the picture below.  This shows how easily AI can create and alter a picture.
  • We covered the high-level concepts on how an AI is built, and how it works.
  • Hope IT will continue with this course, and brainstorm how to get more student interest.
    • Students may think they already know enough  about AI, and don’t need this course.  They are unaware of the ethical, privacy, and security issues AI’s can present.
    • Perhaps the word “integrity” does not explain what can go wrong with an AI.
    • Perhaps we need to call the course “AI and Aliens”, as AI doesn’t think like us at all.  Students are unaware of how different an AI is from a real human.
  • Our Scriptural reflection on the second week was on prayer.  How do we approach God (a much, much powerful being) when we ask for help, or connect?  We reviewed the parable of the neighbor asking a friend for bread at midnight, in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 11.  God is not only our friend, and will provide, especially in desperate times.
Picture generated in our AI course, using ChatGPT.

We thank you for your support and encouragement.  Please pray for our students, and our upcoming courses in January (Data Analysis) and February (WordPress…that allows for a paid internship after the course.)

Wishing you a Spirit-filled holidays.  God bless.

Gratefully,
–Mike Veerman
Hope IT team lead

The high school students at the Stars after-school program got to learn how make a game on their iPhones, moving a marble ball, avoiding the red circles that randomly move around, and getting the marble to the green circle.

 

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