Emily L's Exciting Adventures | Tag

Photo taken by my Language Arts teacher

Have you ever tried public speaking in front of your peers? It’s hard. This is my experience with it.

During my Language Arts class, everyone in my class did a TED Like Talk about something we love. I did mine on a coding platform called Scratch. Scratch is something I’ve really gotten into lately. I thought it would be easy to talk about it, since it’s something I love, but it turns out, public speaking is hard. Really hard. You have to make a presentation that makes sense. You have to show, not just tell. You have to be able to talk about it like it’s your passion. You have to be fluid with your talking and make everything flow. You have to be able to communicate with your audience. You have to make eye contact and use appealing gestures. You have to prepare, prepare, prepare. This was driving me crazy. I imagined it would go very well. I imagined it would fail horribly. It went neither way. I think I did better than I give myself credit for, and I really worked hard. Have I learned from this? Yes. Have I improved? Yes. Will I do this again? Hopefully, yes.

In my computer science class, we used a website called CS First to learn how to code using blocks. CS First was like coding on Scratch for school. Scratch is another website for coding with blocks, and I was first introduced to it when I was younger. I have been coding using Scratch and CS First ever since, and here is a project I worked on using CS First. It is called “Wildfire Forest Game”.

In this game, you are the hero, a cup of water. You try to put out fires by going to them. Once you put out 25 fires, you win. On the other hand, if the fire gets too big before you reach it, the fire spreads and you lose. Someone who helped me make the game is Benigno, also from my computer science class. I had a really fun time making this game and I hope I will be able to make more games.