For his Senior Seminar project, Cody Luu spent every day in January practicing guitar, learning about frets, coding, and researching how video games can help one learn. At the January Project Showcase on January 31th, 2026, he recounted his experience learning guitar, including the many calluses he got, sharing that it’s a “struggle to keep motivation sometimes.”
Cody had quickly realized that learning guitar isn’t the most social interaction, and for many musicians, it can get lonely. Because of this, practicing alone can feel frustrating and repetitive, often leading to burnout. Cody wanted to explore how he could make something as frustrating and isolating as learning guitar into something more social and fun, hopefully making it easier for people to stay motivated.
He started to think about GuitarHero, a popular game that he loves, in which the player uses a guitar-shaped controller to match notes and simulate a live song being played. He wished that there was a version of this game with a real guitar, and although there are attempts of this out there, they were not accessible enough. So, Cody challenged himself to code his own game using C-script. Cody thought that a game like this could help disguise tiny repetitive tasks that might be boring into something fun where people are given goals, autonomy, incentive, and competition.
Cody detailed the four main steps in his development process: hit detection, note timing, note recording, and song incorporation. Hit detection focused on determining whether the correct note was being played on the guitar, which was one of the hardest parts about this code. Note timing made sure that notes were played at the correct moment, and note recording and song incorporation was how Cody mapped real songs into the game so that players could follow along. He also discussed the roles of competition and motivation in learning. He mentioned potential future features such as leaderboards and modes in which players would play directly against each other.
Cody then decided to demonstrate the game live. He looked at all of us while presenting his project, half jokingly asking, “Who’s gonna be my victim…?” We all glanced at each other nervously, but were also excited to see who would be chosen. Cody called up Seminar student James Kitaguchi ‘26 and handed him a guitar. James attempted to play the game live in front of all of us, putting Cody’s game and code to the test. The game did not work perfectly, as the program struggled to recognize certain inputs. However, rather than moving past this, Cody used this imperfect demo to show the reality of what he had been working through all month. He finished his presentation by emphasizing that learning is very rarely smooth or linear, and that failure is unavoidable, but that many of the problems he encountered through both learning guitar and coding helped him understand what he did wrong and how to improve it.
Even after his official presentation time ended, our interest in his project did not end. Luckily, there was a short break in between presentations, and myself and some other students gathered around Cody to watch him play his game and to try it for ourselves. The game worked better this time around, and although most of us were not pros at it, we became slightly more comfortable with it.
Ultimately, Cody’s January project taught us more than just frets and coding, but about learning itself. He told us that if there was one thing we should take away from his presentation it’s that the “things that are hard are the things that are worth doing”.
(Throughout January, Senior Seminar students work on a project that enables them to go deeper into a chosen topic, which they then present to their peers, teachers, and parents at the end of January. This article was originally written as a response for the course, and modified for publication.)
