“Having experience with coding has definitely made my high school year so far a lot less stressful, because it’s just one class I really don’t have to worry about.” - Soren Ingraham, 9th grade
Soren decided his future career in the 7th grade - game developer. It was his first year participating in Bold Idea’s weekly computer science program. Over two semesters Soren learned to design games and code them in the Javascript programming language.
“That definitely got me thinking about how games are designed and how fun it would be to work on them,” he said.
“I got to make my own game and see people have fun playing it. I shared it with a bunch of people at my school, and they all got hooked for a couple days. That was really fun.”
In nine weeks, Soren and his team made a 3D version of the classic arcade game Asteroids. The player can fly around in a spaceship, shoot at asteroids, and try to protect a planet they designed.
“We had used up so much memory on the computer just on the asteroids, like 500 asteroids floating around, that all it was able to handle was just a plain white sphere for the planet,” he laughs.
Prior to Bold Idea, he had tried robotics at school and a little online coding, but never a lot of it - much less code his own game. “This has really opened my eyes to everything that’s possible with coding.”
Soren is still coming up with ideas for future games and writing them down in his journal. He’s tried to make a couple of them on his own and wants to build more experience in Javascript.
His main focus now is freshman year at TAG Magnet School, a Dallas ISD high school ranked as #11 in the nation by the US News and World Report '2018 Top High Schools in America’. Soren applied for this competitive school and was accepted.
Computer science is a required course at TAG, but Soren feels more than prepared to take it on. “Having experience with coding has definitely made my high school year so far a lot less stressful, because it’s just one class I really don’t have to worry about,” he said.
In fact, Bold Idea has given him the confidence and skills to help his classmates catch on to tough concepts, and he’s and connect with people who share his interests.
“It’s let me make friends with a lot more people - people at my school who are also interested in computer science,” he said.
Soren now mentors younger Bold Idea students in east Dallas and it’s clear he’s having an impact on them. “He is very helpful in every way,” said 6th grader Nadia Flores. Soren worked with Nadia this fall to code a website about an ice cream shop.
At TAG, he’s also taking an elective called Math Behind Games, where he’s learning how to apply concepts from math to different board games.
“For my project the past six weeks, I coded a simulation of a Monopoly game to figure out which spaces were landed on the most and the average revenue per turn for each property, so that was really fun. Jail was the space landed on the most, because there are four different ways to get to jail - speeding, landing on Go to Jail, chance and community chest. But the property where you’d earn money the fastest was New York I believe, because it was about seven spaces away from jail. That was really fun to do.”
Why learn to code when you’re young?
According to Soren: “It’s just becoming a more and more important skill as time goes on. In just five years, everyone must know at least a little coding. The earlier you learn, the easier it will be. Computer science can be really interesting depending on what you try. Show them (middle schoolers) the things that are fun, like making your own game, and that will get them interested.”