Lesson 2: Jippity Overview

OK — you have a kid who wants to try her hand at making a videogame, or a website, or some interactive piece of art of music, and you have heeded my advice to find a good tool you can trust — in this case, Jippity.  When you visit the homepage, you are presented with a few options:

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Along the top bar:

1) Projects will take you to a gallery of other kids’ work — playable games and simulations.

2) Courses leads to structured curricula ideal for a workshop or a cool coding elective.

3) Learn contains a kid-friendly wiki-style digital textbook on the basics of coding.

But the star of the show, the main way to get up-and-running, is the “idea box” in the middle of the Create page.  Like all the best AI tools, Jippity makes it a piece-of-cake to get to work starting from just a simple idea.

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Send a message to create a new project.  You’ll get taken to the workspace, which holds a simple code editor, a few buttons for essential functions, a preview window to check out code as you work, and a chat panel to go back-and-forth with the beginner-friendly AI.

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So let’s get to it!  The following sections will walk through the process of coding a game from scratch, with no prerequisite knowledge or expertise needed.  You can do it!  That goes for parents and kids equally.  AI is so good now, all you need is an idea.  Each section will contain a video where I build the game live, step-by-step, as well as a breakdown in text and images.  First things first — let’s control a character with the keyboard.

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