Terminal Two’s First Friday: Join Videogame Quests to Learn & Reinforce Coding Skills
Terminal Two is a company incubated by Endless that offers action-packed, self-paced games and distance-learning curriculum used by parents and teachers around the world.
This Friday, April 2, 2021, Terminal Two will host its first ever First Friday, a free online event where gamers of all levels will come together to hack games, learn some new skills, and experience the joys of learning through play while going on these videogame Quests. This week’s event is the kickoff for the exciting six-month First Friday series.
As a community-building exercise, Terminal Two has launched these monthly First Fridays, a free recurring event designed for students, parents, and teachers to spend time learning and reinforcing coding skills while navigating Terminal Two’s quests. By RSVP’ing to the event via Terminal Two’s Facebook Page and sharing their experience on social media, participants may even be entered to win prizes and random drawings.
Terminal Two by Endless, the producer of Endless OS and The Endless Mission, have launched four learning quests, each full of videogames designed to teach coding skills. Terminal Two tackles what Endless sees as the biggest barrier to learning to code: making coding education entertaining enough to get lost in for hours.
"When we were building Endless OS, we discovered that so many of our engineers had learned to code by hacking their games," said Matt Dalio, founder and president of Endless. "They had more fun hacking their games than playing the games. We had our epiphany. If we could build games that harnessed that same joy and delight, we could make kids want to learn to code."
The Terminal Two suite of games seeks to recreate that joy, traversing some of the most popular game genres, with each game focused on building specific skills along guided quests. It takes cues from gaming professionals rather than the educational software that dominates the sector. While the vast majority of educational games that are available haven't risen to the level of delight and joy that are in consumer games, Terminal Two bucks the trend and starts with fun.
"Research tells us time and again that relevance, meaning, and context are most important for learning. Play is by definition those three things. When a kid is completely absorbed focus is no longer a question. Learning is not just more powerful, it becomes incidental. The learning has to be indistinguishable from the fun," says Dennis Bartels, Managing Director of Endless.
The Terminal Two collection of quests includes two beginner-friendly modules, The Core of Code & Thinking Logically. Players will learn to think like a programmer, interacting with basic concepts and advancing to writing their own code. For the intermediate and advanced, Artificial Intelligence Through the Levels & Developing Code Fluency will lead players through designing A.I. and gaining fluency with code syntax.
All First Friday dates: April 2nd | May 7th | June 4th | July 2nd | August 6th | September 3rd