MOSES LAKE — The challenge absorbed students in the Digipen class at Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center.

“I came Saturdays,” said Brayan Lopez, a junior from Othello.

“We put in every second we could until the very last day,” said McKayla Lake, junior from Moses Lake.

The all-absorbing project was the construction of a complex computer program combining original concepts, original coding and graphic design. The fact it was fun was kind of incidental.

The students build their own video games from the ground up as part of regional and state competition for FBLA. The CB Tech chapter smoked the regional competition, taking the top five places. The annual state conference is about two weeks away.

“We’re learning it (coding) the fun way,” said instructor Terri Pixlee. “And they are learning college-level coding.”

Lake was one-third of CB Tech’s first all-girl team, which also included Jeniffer Carlson, a senior from Moses Lake, and Danika Bolyard, a junior from Coulee City. Their original concept was very ambitions. “We actually were thinking about multiple different genres,” Bolyard said, where players would have a choice of games inside a virtual video arcade. But that proved to be too ambitious for the time allowed, so they settled on a game based on the 1999 movie Galaxy Quest.

“I didn’t like that movie,” Bolyard said.

Once they had the concept the team had to write the code and design the characters. “It’s very fun to work on,” Lake said. But it’s not easy. “We’d fix one thing and something else would go wrong,” she said.

Bolyard led the way on the coding, and “I was more the artist,” Carlson said. Part of Lake’s job was “to make sure they didn’t fight because they’re both artists.”

They kept working, and even managed to break new programming ground. They were told, Bolyard said, that the program was too limited to build a leader board. They proved that wrong.

Lopez was the lead programmer for his team. The team based its project on a game he remembered from childhood, kind of – he only played it once, he said. But its concept was intriguing. “You were in a spaceship and you had to defend it from both sides.”

He had training in the Basic programming language. “It taught me to think like a computer.” His team’s game has some humorous elements along with defending-the-planet stuff. “Making it funny helped make it fun,” he said.

Lopez and his team also added a bonus level. “The bonus level looks really different from the rest of the game” and that too was part of keeping it challenging.

The challenge and the fun do have a serious purpose in the end. “This is a good foot in the door to start learning how computers work,” Bolyard said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.