Over the summer, Portola High students channeled their passion for coding into personal projects. Some, such as sophomores Siyou Wang and Mylyn Zheng, created a 2D puzzle video game, while others, like junior Sashan Umashankar built a tutoring nonprofit.
Wang and Zheng’s video game centers around an unnamed character trapped in a tower, who is reliving her memories because her past self repressed them, according to Wang. Each floor of this tower has a puzzle that can be used to unlock her memories and progress the story by revealing more and more about the character’s troubled past.
“I love playing video games, and games like When the Past was Around, Gorogoa, and South Scrimshaw definitely inspired the story for our game,” Wang said.
The team used a program called Unity 2D, which uses a coding language known as C#, to create their video game. Because of their inexperience, they worked with Cory Nambu, a teacher who specializes in game development, every weekend to learn how to use the program, according to Wang. Because C# was an object-oriented language, the duo worried about how to classify certain objects in Unity using the different object classes in C#.
“Because my parents also make video games, they were able to connect me with a useful teacher, which was helpful,” Wang said.
The two met other challenges along the way besides the coding language. One concern was finding an art style that conveyed the story without being too detailed, according to Wang. More detail meant that Wang would have a harder time drawing all the assets for the game. They were also concerned about coming up with unique puzzle ideas that were fun for the player but also easy to make for the duo, according to Zheng.
Umashankar’s summer project also focused on coding, but instead of making a video game, he created a CodingToAll, a tutoring nonprofit aimed at teaching coding to students. Currently, the organization has around 10-12 tutors and 15 coding students with tutoring offered on a weekly basis, according to Umashankar.
“I’ve always had a passion for helping the community and I’ve always had a passion for computer science so I wanted to combine these two interests,” Umashankar said.
Over the summer, CodingToAll partnered with the Santa Ana public library system to teach their interns and teenage students about computer science. He understood that not everyone had the same access to computer science education as he did and wanted to spread that knowledge.
“This is a huge problem because if you look at the technology workforce, most of them are primarily from a well-off background, so we wanted to bridge this,” Umashankar said.
In the future, Umashankar wants to improve his coding curriculum by adding more projects that are tailored to what students have been learning so that they can apply their learning more often.
“Projects are really important especially during the learning phase,” Umashankar said. “ Even if they’re beginners, if they’re only learning the syntax, they won’t be able to apply it and won’t be able to practice applying it,”
Umashankar wants to spread his nonprofit to other school districts in California, and, hopefully, make it available nationally and internationally by growing several different chapters of his nonprofit.
