Age Range: Middle Advanced to High School

Difficulty: Hard

What is Blender?

Unlike other learning to code programs, Blender is most famous for its built-in 3D Rendering Engine (“Bender Cycles” and “Bender Render”). So Blender’s top propriety is for 3D and 2D animators to have a free open source program to practice in. This means that YOU the user can create their own environment, elements, and animate them to move the way you want them to. In Blender, there is another Engine that is built-in and allows for users to design their own games; this is call “Blender Game”.

Why Blender?

This past summer we used Blender’s Game Engine to study game design in the classroom. We used Blender’s built-in Game Engine which uses a combination of python programming and the built-in game logic bricks. Students were excited to be charge of their own games right from the moment of starting up on Blender. Below is the two lesson plans and a link to the official Blender website.


Summer 2016

Maze Lesson was taught to the High School Camp and the Snake Game Lesson was taught to the middle school camp.


Resources:

Blender Home Website: Blender

Blender Tutorials: Tutorials

Maze Lesson Plan: Maze Game Presentation, Maze Game Lesson Plan

Snake Game Lesson Plan: Snake Game Presentation, Snake Game Lesson Plan, Snake Game Script Handouts, Download Blender File for Snake Game