Learning to Code with a Boardgame

markmcb writes "While some of us cling tight to our memories of Apple-filled classrooms playing The Oregon Trail and driving our Turtle around in Logo, children today have many other ways to learn about the inner-working of computers and the code that drives them. Wired.com is running an interesting article about a boardgame in which players must use simple logic similar to that used in programming to get their skier down the mountain. From the article: 'Using basic math, players have to figure out which paths are open to them and then decide the fastest way to the finish line. The trick, however, is learning which paths are open to you using only programmer jargon like 'if (X==1)' then you can take the green path or 'while (X4) you can take the orange path,' where X is the roll of the die.'"

Comments

Robo Rally

[Speare]

Also try Robo Rally. Of course, this deals with how to program a computer with a VERY limited instruction set, and with damaged hardware. :)

engineering application

[millahtime]

This could have good implications on future engineers. Where I read that the US is falling behind, this could help teach the logic engineers, especially electrical and computer engineers, need to use regularly.

Actual squares from the game

[Radres]

"Job outsourced to India! Go directly to trade school, do not buy a house, do not get laid."

"High school reunion time! The same guy who kicked your ass every day in high school and barely passed wood shop laughs at you because he makes more than you as a plumber while you wasted 4 years at college. Go back 3 spaces."

Why not build a robot??

[technoextreme]

There are fifty differnt robot kits floating about. They are much more entertaining and probably can help people program just as much as a boring board game.

SkiFree!

[sonixtwo]

Maybe some kid will figure out how to finally get past that damn monster!!

Looks boring

[LordNimon]

I tried reading the rules, but they're hard to understand just by reading the web page (and yes, I'm a programmer). From what I gather, there are no real decisions that the player makes. That is, you roll the dice and your move is based solely on that dice roll and whatever square you happen to be on.

What would be cooler is if while playing the game, you had to build a "program" of sorts, and you can't win the game until your program produces a specific output. You could then compete against other players for resources needed to finish your program. This would allow you multiple ways to win based mostly on your ability to understand programming concepts.

I see this game as a cool idea, but it's really just a first step.

Games that teach computer logic

[g_adams27]

For learning the basics of AND, OR, XOR and NOT logic, along with building basic circuits, you just can't do any better than Robot Odyssey. This is probably the greatest educational game I ever played as a young teenager. I trace my interest in studying, and then making a career out of computer science largely back to this game.

For slightly younger people, there's Rocky's Boots made by the same people (The Learning Company). It teaches a lot of the same things, but in an easier (and cuter) style.

All you need is an Apple II emulator like AppleWin and you're all set!

Re:Bad Design

[TheRaven64]

Those who don't get taught GOSUB have to invent it themselves. I wasn't taught about GOSUB when I first learned to program, so I ended up writing my own. Every time you called GOTO, you wrote your line number into an array and then incremented a variable. When you returned, you copied that line number into a variable, wrote a return value over it, decremented the stack counter and jumped back. Due to the limitations of the language (and, perhaps, my understanding of the language aged 7) you could only store one integer (the return value) on the `stack', and it could only be a maximum of 255 calls deep, but it was a stack. Like early computer designs which stored the return values in the base of the function (which I didn't learn about until 11 years later), it was not capable of recursion.

Some years later, I implemented a pseudo- virtual memory system using a very primitive analogue of mmap on the Psion Series 3. This allowed for arbitrary-length strings - something not possible in the built-in BASIC-like OPL, which used PASCAL-style strings.

My somewhat rambling point? Sometimes it can be better to learn to program in limited settings. If you don't have the tools you need for writing good code, but do have a Turing-complete language, then you end up inventing the tools yourself - and then you understand them much better than anyone who learned simply by being told that they exist.