Aletta Shikololo

WINDHOEK - With The 4th Industrial Revolution just around the corner, Information Technology guru Keneth Nekundi is already catching up with the new technology by recreating a computer game using python programming language.

Youth Corner met the brilliant Nekundi at the ICT Summit 2019 a few weeks ago as he was showcasing his skills on how he recreated a snake game that he entitled ‘Trial by fire’.

“The game works by moving the snake around within the border of the window. The goal of the game is to get the highest score without colliding with the border or the snake’s body (this will reset the score to 0 and you will have to restart from the beginning). 

Every time the snake eats one of the foods that appear randomly within the window, the score increases and the snake’s body gets longer. To make it more challenging, I coded the game to increase the speed of the snakes’ movement whenever the score increases,” says Nekundi to Youth Corner adding previously, he only had experience in Java language (a general-purpose programming language that is class-based) from his studies hence it was challenging for him to understand the syntax and rules of python.

According to Nekundi, what motivated him to create the game was his passion in the gaming industry.
He said “I enjoyed playing games since I was a kid and that passion grew into me wanting to know how a game works. This game is based on the early snake games that were on the old school Nokia phones.”

Nekundi who is a second-year student, pursuing his bachelor degree in computer science, specialising in software development, at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (Nust) aims to create more programs of that kind to expand his horizons in order to create his own software that will be used by Namibian companies to empower the technological scene of Namibia.

“As a student, I want to prove that it is possible to create your own program with just the basics and add a little extra hard work to make the dream work,” he concluded.