This year for the Hour of Code, we did an activity entitled "Dance Party." In my opinion, creativity is present in those who are able to stray away from standards set forth by others and have the ability to output something completely original. Creativity is important when learning. People who can implement creativity while they're learning will end up refining their knowledge even further. I believe that my project for this year may be the most creative thing I have formulated. The objective of this activity was to manipulate sprites and the background of the given plane to create an interactive dance party. In this case, I created a binary encoder which is able to convert the alphabetical characters A-F into binary code. I find that extending the boundaries of what was perceived to be possible conforms with my definition of "creativity". This activity definitely allowed others and me to express our creativity in different ways. The resources they provided using blocks definitely opened a gate to new opportunities, which is why I diverted my attention away from making a mainstream project.
This photograph depicts the program outputting a bit of 0 after successfully encoding one character. Essentially, one byte represents one character and one byte represents eight bits (1 or 0). Thus, 1 = white/light gray (for continuation) and 0 =black/dark gray.
The program can by interacted with by typing a character within the range of A-F on the keyboard. This program can take a maximum of four bytes or characters. If the phrase to be encoded is less than four bytes, the user can press the space bar to exclude the required amount of placeholders for the string. After each byte is displayed by the program, a gold screen will appear, indicating the start of a new byte. A red screen would indicate that the program has completed displaying the screen. The letter M can be pressed to show the remaining amount of bites for debugging purposes. My project can be visited by clicking on this embedded link.
I definitely enjoyed this activity. In my opinion, it takes precedence among others. Though its premise may seem simple, it had unseen potential. This allowed my creativity to be sparked.
The video to the left of this text box depicts my program in action. In this case, I typed the following characters: SPACE, B, A D.