Goals

This station is a top-down introduction to some important programming concepts. Rather than learning the nitty-gritty of a language, you will start with a working game, read the source code, and discuss design considerations for your own programming. Key concepts include:

• Model/view architecture: Models should manage a program's state; views should manage rendering and user interacation.
• Modularity: Small, resuable components with clear interfaces.
• State: A complete representation of what's happening in the app at any given time.

Also, some more focused concepts:

• Tick-based time model: Complex systems are much easier to model when you break time into discrete steps and describe how they move from one moment to the next.
• Frames and multiple coordinate systems: We use some tricks to move between different coordinate systems.
• Event models: You can manage interactivity by creating objects that represent things that happen.
• Coding style: Lots of little tips that you can best learn by reading others' code.

Preparation

• Download and install Processing
• Download version 1 of the Hospitals game
• Open the annotated source code

Tangible User Interface Tables

For today's purposes, you will use the tangible user interface tables as a learning tool. We will teach you how to use the tangible interface tables in more detail later, but if you don't want to wait:

• Read about how tangible interface tables work. Follow the setup instructions to install reacTIVision and the TUIO Processing library.
• Download version 2 of the Hospitals game
• Read the annotated source code for the TUIO version.