Minion Tap (2014)

I taught Computer Science at Harvard-Westlake for two years. During the two-week midterm review of my first year I decided to spend a 45-minute class period building an iOS app from scratch on the overhead projector in front of the class.

I started off by making some colorful rectangles on the screen. Then I added three boxes to each rectangle to give them Minecraft-ish faces. Then the rectangles would move around when the screen was pressed. The students had the idea to make one of the rectangles “it”, and keep score of how many taps it took to find it. Then the rectangles would shuffle. It was surprisingly fun.

In my spare time, I polished up the graphics, added some features (like the powershot), gave it a bit more complex scoring system w/ achievements, then hooked it up to Gamecenter.

I think my favorite feature is how the screen (and individual UI elements) rattle when the powershot is used.

It was originally intended to be a silly 2-day project, so my initial implementation was super-spaghetti. There was no over-arching design concept for this – I kept on adding random features as I went.. I couldn’t stop myself.

The code is horrible. It’s on my github. It’s under the name Project Fieldlord, since that’s what my students call me. You can find the original 45-minute demo app under the Original_Project directory.