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Show HN: Variables War, a kid-friendly code playing-cards game

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Re: Show HN: Variables War, a kid-friendly code playing-cards game

#21

Post by yann_r »

jerf wrote: post #7

I don't understand the "Condition" cards: "Forbids any card that is breaking this condition. If the condition is already broken, then forbids any card that is not going towards its resolution." I don't know what it means to "forbid" a card. The word appear nowhere else in the card descriptions or game rules. Some (non-trivial) examples are probably called for; it seems like one of the more powerful and complicated ca…

"Forbids any card..." means that no one, not you nor an opponent, can put on your board that will break the condition written on the card (or worsen the situation it it's already broken).

For instance, if you have the "varB Someone could put a "Increment one var by 1" card on your variable A, as it would bring you closer from having "varB < var A"

Re: Show HN: Variables War, a kid-friendly code playing-cards game

#23

Post by wernsey »

This is very cool and I'd like to try it.

I participate in an outreach program that help under privileged children. We use project based learning methods to for topics that aren't covered in the normal curriculum. We also don't have access to enough computers.

I've recently looked into "teaching computer science to kids without using computers" because I believe that the skills are valuable in other domains (for example, being able to think through a problem logically or as an algorithm might help them with mathematics or economics later).

Here are two of the resources I've found:

[1] https://code.org/curriculum/unplugged [2] https://csunplugged.org/en/

If anyone would like to reply with more resources I'd really appreciate it.

Re: Show HN: Variables War, a kid-friendly code playing-cards game

#25

Post by webmaven »

yann_r wrote: post #21
jerf wrote: post #7

I don't understand the "Condition" cards: "Forbids any card that is breaking this condition. If the condition is already broken, then forbids any card that is not going towards its resolution." I don't know what it means to "forbid" a card. The word appear nowhere else in the card descriptions or game rules. Some (non-trivial) examples are probably called for; it seems like one of the more powerful and complicated ca…

"Forbids any card..." means that no one, not you nor an opponent, can put on your board that will break the condition written on the card (or worsen the situation it it's already broken). For instance, if you have the "varB Someone could put a "Increment one var by 1" card on your variable A, as it would bring you closer from having "varB < var A"

"Block" might be a better term than "forbid".

Re: Show HN: Variables War, a kid-friendly code playing-cards game

#27

Post by bitsquirrel »

nirelBRACITOS wrote: post #8
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the point. Kids don't necessarily know what they'll like until they try it, that's sort of the whole point of being a kid.

Most of the parents here will abuse their kids on a weekly basis with coding crap until they “like” it. Kids like to run, jump, play, be with other kids, not code.

Kids like different things. I apparently liked to be a smartass.

On the BBC Micro, tape-based games needed to be loaded into memory at 0x0E00. But the floppy disk driver (DFS) took up 0x0E00 to 0x1900, so you couldn't just copy your games from tape to disk.

My dad wrote a simple program in BBC Basic, to load a game from disk at 0x1900 and then relocate it to 0x0E00 and run it. I thought this was ingenious, but kind of slow.

The BBC Micro user guide must have been very good, because I (7) managed to learn enough 6502 assembly language to rewrite the relocator. My version took just a few seconds.

I'm not sure my relationship with my dad has ever quite recovered.

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