The Story of Bee the World™

Earlier this year, Anantika's sister, Aditi, designed an educational game, Exciting Math. At the time, Anantika helped out with that project, but she also resolved that she would create her own iPhone game. She had a fully formed idea back in early May, that she called "Bee the Earth."

She described it in detail to me. She pictured bees being shot by nice and cute monsters from space through clouds and rainbows onto flowers whose colors matched the color of each bee's stinger. The clouds would make the bees bounce, and the bees had to avoid power lines, thunderbolts, and other nasties on their way to pollinating the flowers. The point was to help Earth's ailing bee population.

Then a few weeks ago, her class was assigned a "marketplace" project, wherein each student comes up with a product or service that they sell for fake money to classmates, teachers and parents. Anantika insisted on creating her game, which she now called "Bee the World." Meanwhile, she and her sister had been learning Scratch programming from their mom, so using GameSalad seemed like a natural fit for creating the game so that it could be put on others' devices. GameSalad's Cannon Physics game template proved a good starting point for this project. (All the graphics are from either the Cannon Physics template, or from OpenClipArt.)

In a fun coincidence, her class also had a bee model project at the same time, so I've posted some of the photos of her real-life bee model as well.

Bee the World is available for iPhone and iPad.