303 Software

Can a Game Teach Programming?

by Trey Metrailer

Definitely sorta. A while back I stumbled upon a cool flash game called Light-Bot in which you must control a robot to advance it to a goal. You do so by assembling a set of simple commands (move forward, turn left/right, jump) which are then followed by the robot. You'll need to organize you commands into reusable functions, as you're limited to the number of commands you can give. Maybe a good way to get kids (or managers) an introduction to programming.

This week I discovered a new and more challenging spin on the robot programming game. RoboZZle improves on the concept by adding recursion, stacks, and memory to the toolset. So well done is this game, I actually installed Microsoft Silverstripe to run it, and that's saying a lot for a Mac-centric Flash developer. The puzzles get very challenging, and I'm still not 100% sure on how the stack and memory work in the game, but I'm sure I'll be playing more this weekend. I think RoboZZle has the opportunity to teach more advanced techniques to even experienced programmers.

So, if you're coming in for an interview here, you may want to brush-up on your gaming skills.

Light-Bot http://armorgames.com/play/2205/light-bot     

  RoboZZle http://robozzle.com/

Posted in learning, gaming on 5/1/2009