BotLogic.us: A Game That Gets Kids Excited to Program

*there's ... always fail on homophones when I'm over-tired.

Great feedback! I love to hear it anytime a young kid was able to enjoy the game, even in the rough form it's in.

The ghost option is something I've seriously considered, although frankly it is closer to the bottom of my list at this point as there are a few other things I think are more important to get in first like loops/user defined functions/etc..

The delete X is a good point and insertion point comments are great, and are issues I've struggled with how to deal with it properly. I have "drag and drop" reordering on the roadmap, and so I forsee deleting/insert point becoming something more natural like simply dragging the command out of the timeline to delete it and dragging a command to a specific point in the timeline to add it vs. simply tapping to queue it at the end.

I like your comment about progression too, as I've really tried my best to make the game be something that's more relaxed in the way that concepts are learned and lets the user get comfortable with the idea of simply separating logic from actions and building simple "programs".

I would agree wholeheartedly too that the game most certainly doesn't teach programming at this point as much as it gets kids excited about the idea of programming. I think once we have some more functionality around loops/functions/etc.. than it will be a little more feature complete in that aspect, but no matter what my ultimate goal is to demystify the idea of technology and programming and let players feel the power of building programs, making mistakes, and ultimately successfully completing levels while using logic, reasoning, and basic "programming" skills.

> "RoboZZle requires Silverlight"

FWIW. I didn't go any further with it.

There are actually even surprisingly more than one would initially think. In addition to Robozzle and BotLogic, there's LightBot(actually 2 versions), Lego Mindstorms, Daisy the Dinosaur, CargoBot, Move the Turtle, Robot Turtles (board game), and RoboMind (just found this one, looks fascinating) to name just a select few of an ever growing number of similar games. Personally, I hope one day there are more "programming" games with an educational spin than there are first person shooters, but that's just because I'm hooked.

You know what got me excited about programming? QBASIC!

And its mode 13h.

Sounds like an up to date version of logowriter to me. I think anything that teaches kids to program early is a good thing.

Well, Robot Turtles is a version of Robot Rally themed for young kids. Take that as you will.

This makes me giggle a bit, because for me, when I saw Robot Turtles launch their campaign on Sept. 3rd (1 month after we released the BotLogic prototype on August 1st), I said "hey, this sounds pretty much like BotLogic!" :) I had hoped we would see the quick success they did as well considering the similarities, but I guess that's what you get when you aren't a fancy big name Google employee. I certainly have my work cut out for me.

For what it's worth, I ended up backing Robot Turtles too because I think the idea is cool! I think it's also cool to be able to use "pseudo-code" to build your programs and watch the program execute on your computer, and I think each has it's benefits and drawbacks.

I used this to introduce high schoolers at a STEM summer camp a few years back and they loved it. There appears to be an android/iphone app as well now, but I haven't personally tried it http://light-bot.com/

Technically, I was inspired by Rails for Zombies (http://railsforzombies.org) as I had been learning Rails for my new job, and had that fresh in my mind when my bosses said "come up with a new idea". For me, the inspiration was "how COOL would it have been if the interactive console in Rails for Zombies actually made the zombies do stuff and it was more like a game than learning to code!!" After some discussion, the choice was made to switch from zombies to robots because a) "programming" a robot made more sense than programming a zombie and b) robots seemed more "gender/age neutral" than zombies that have a more limited appeal. It wasn't until much later on that we started doing market analysis that we found LightBot. To me, LightBot was a confirmation that there was a market for "games that use programming as a tool", but not something that we were necessarily going to mirror. LightBot is fun, but ramps up quickly and gets pretty in depth into programming concepts pretty quickly. I wanted BotLogic to be a more subtle introduction where the user didn't even realize they were learning how to program along the way. I also wanted players to get comfortable with the idea of "syntax" and "typing code", and I feel the terminal is an important part of the game that LightBot doesn't have (not that it's a bad thing for their game, just that it's definitely something vastly different than going with a purely visual UI).

"It's anti-educational."

What a rubbish, blanket statement. Something you hadn't thought about until 5 minutes ago should now be created for free.

Get off your high horse, if you want this to be free, by all means go and make it. Some great math books are free too, and some great ones you have to buy. To claim either is anti-educational is nonsense.