This year's Australian STEM Video Game Challenge has been won by Anastasia, Ava, Paige and Lucy. While winning an award sounds pretty good, collecting their award was the best part of all.
Hi, I'm Anastasia, hi I'm Ava, hi I'm Paige, and I'm Lucy, and we're video game designers.
We decided to create a video game and enter it in the Australian STEM Video Game Challenge. We are all year 6 students from St Anthony's Primary School in Western Australia and our teacher Mr Wynne was our mentor.
We started with a theme, which was transformation. Then we wrote a story, then we made a game based on the story. And we made it on Gamestar Mechanic. It took about 12 weeks.
Our game is called Unknown Dimensions. It's about four sisters who are separated. They each have a locket which they use to find each other. Every time one sister united with another the locket would glow and the picture would reveal the two sisters that found each other.
Making the game was really fun, but also challenging. It was tricky working in a group because we did not always agree with each other. Everything took a lot longer than we thought it would and it was hard to get everything done on time. The Gamestar Mechanic software made the coding pretty easy to understand. We tried to make the game begin easy and then get harder, but not too hard, because we wanted the players to still have fun.
Over 3000 students entered the competition. We couldn't believe it when Mr Wing called our parents and told us that we'd won. To get our award, we got to fly to Melbourne to a gaming expo.
We just arrived at Melbourne Airport, we're waiting for our bags. It's quarter to one in the morning and um yeah, we're trying to figure out where our bags are.
PAX was really busy and there was lots to do. We got to try out lots of games and hang out with cool cosplay characters. We even got to try some VR games. We saw a lot of cosplays and took photos with them. Lucy got a giant alpaca this big. And of course. We got our prizes.
For our prize we got a really cool gaming headset. An LED mouse. A mousepad. And a block of chocolate. We got chocolate. After PAX, we got to visit Science Works. I'm really excited to see what's in there. I've been waiting for this time since I found out I was going. There was an arcade where the winning games from STEM Video Game Challenge were set up, and there were heaps of other science experiments and activities to try.
Making Unknown Dimensions was a great experience. We learned that coding is fun and also really useful, and we can't wait to do more of it in the future. It's amazing what you can do with hard work. If you're a kid who wants to get into coding, here's some free advice. Don't give up, believe in yourself and communicate.
