Week 1 Workshop: Look inside a jump

A hands-on hour with the home trial, building the habit this course runs on — read the number the simulation reports, don't estimate it.

24 February 2027

Preparation#

Read the week 1 lecture and open the home page once before the session, just to see that it loads and a jump runs. Nothing to install, nothing to configure — if it doesn’t run, say so at the start of the session rather than during it.

Activity#

Working alone or in pairs, at a laptop each:

1. Run at least three jumps: one short press in immediate mode, one full hold in immediate mode, and one charged jump. Fill in the table from the lecture task as you go — don’t reconstruct it from memory afterward.
2. Compare your table with the pair next to you. Everyone’s numbers should differ (nobody presses identically), but the pattern — hold longer, jump higher — should hold for both tables. If it doesn’t, that’s worth raising.
3. As a group: name one moment in a jump that happens before the character leaves the ground, in a game you know. It doesn’t have to be dramatic — a controller has to register the input before anything moves, and that gap is real even when nothing is drawn for it.

Output#

The completed table and the two sentences from the spec above, handed to your tutor at the end of the session or brought to next week’s workshop.

Criteria#

The table’s numbers come from the home trial, not a guess dressed up as one — if two rows report identical numbers to three decimal places, that’s a sign they were copied rather than measured. Beyond that, this session isn’t marked: it’s the rehearsal for the Jump Autopsy assessment in week 3, which asks for the same kind of table at a larger scale.