Hello Game Boy! for students of all ages Hello Game Boy! for students of all ages

For a glimpse of what WSU students have been up to in John Harrison's "Assembly Language for Engineers," come to the "Hello Game Boy!" event from 7-9 p.m. today (Friday, May 9) at Mindscape, 10234 W. 13th St. N. (13th and Maize Road). Engineering students worked with Nintendo Game Boys to write nearly 20 new applications for youth that WSU students will demonstrate to the preteen youth group at Mindscape's Game Night.

Hello Game Boy! is a showcase of new Game Boy applications for youth.

This semester, WSU engineering students wrote nearly 20 applications for the Game Boy as term projects for their programming language class. At MindScape, these students will be showing them off.

The WSU students have written a large variety of applications, all designed for pre-teenagers. Their projects include skiing and shooting games, 3D tic-tac-toe, mazes and the Game Boy as a musical instrument.

While the applications are a lot of fun, said Harrison, they also are the culmination of hard work. The students wrote all of the programs in Assembler, a computer programming language approximating the 1s and 0s of binary machine code. Writing these applications taught the students how to interact with a computer's internal architecture hands-on.

All of the WSU students participating were enrolled in a class called Assembly Language Programming for Engineers, taught by John Harrison. Harrison is director of WSU's Center for Research in Arts, Technology, Education, and Learning (CRATEL), which explores how technology and the arts can interact to spawn new learning environments. John is also associate professor of violin at WSU and the concertmaster of the 成人头条 Symphony Orchestra.