How we made a cardboard program code or a Scratch version of the Golem Battle educational board game

The board game that teaches the basics of programming and robotics "Battle of the Golems" is already 5 years old. And the game continues to live and develop. You can read about the ideas we put into it and the development of the first edition. in this article.

But now we will talk about a rather radical change in the methodological and visual component, which we risked to introduce into the game, including thanks to the requests of parents and teachers. The game in two editions stayed almost unchanged in terms of the method of visualizing the program code, which was based on flowcharts, but in the third edition we “gave up”

But we were also asked to connect the game not only with the school curriculum and textbooks, but also with the languages ​​​​and programming environments that children study at the initial stage, namely Scratch and Python. All the same, our game is aimed at children 7-10 years old, and it was these environments and languages ​​that were most in demand.

But you can look at the original development table, where you can see that we worked on not only them:

The development of such command cards (namely, with them you set the program for your Golem robot) began back in 2017. Taking as a basis the current version of Scratch 2 at that time, we changed the main commands to the block type:

And here's what an example map looked like in Python:

Then we gave PDF files to parents and teachers for testing (the Python version can still be downloaded, since we do not plan to publish it yet) and in the end we received feedback that the children ... began to get confused. They were confused before, but more in the position of the Robots and their orientation on the field, but not in the teams (maximum in complex cycles and conditions with sensors). Now the children simply confused the commands, as some started the game earlier than they mastered the Scratch environment and did not save even the explanatory icons.

We decided not to touch the Python commands, but we had to add a text explanation to the blocks. After all the tests, 2018 almost passed, the unsuccessful launch of the pre-order at its end, the onset of 2019, and with it ... the transition to the 3rd version of Scratch.

We had to stock up on a new block color map and redraw all the maps, improving them along the way (and removing the Scratch kitten since we weren't allowed to add it).

The result can be seen in this example. On the left is the map of the "classic" Golem Battle, and on the right is the Scratch representation:

Adults, brought up on classic flowcharts, may object that it has become worse now, but testing “on children” showed that they perceive cards in this version well and draw parallels for themselves between the computer and cardboard environments.

The only good advice we got was to increase the color contrast (by making the background lighter and block colors brighter) and to increase the size of the duplicate infographic icons.

The new edition is called "Battle of Golems. Steambot Card League"and in addition to changing the team cards, we reworked the principle of building the playing field, the mechanisms for building robots and made other changes, which allowed us to fit the game into the psychological ceiling" up to 1000 rubles. And as with our other games, we will publish it through crowdfunding and we will be glad if you support the game.

We hope that this edition will be successful, and we decided to make Python (and soon Java) command maps, as well as the "classic" version of the Golem Battle freely distributed and downloadable.

Source: habr.com