GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell • Hacker News Board

Re: GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell

#41

Post by TulliusCicero » Wed, May 25, 2022, 4:34 PM UTC

kulikalov wrote: post #12

I saw many games trying to teach programming, but never heard of any of them gaining significant popularity. I wonder why? I guess "play games instead of reading books" idea attracts audience with low motivation?

I suppose that depends on what you mean by popularity.

* CodeCombat is gamified programming lessons and seems to be reasonably popular with kids.

* Human Resource Machine teaches assembly language programming and was popular -- it even got a sequel, Seven Billion Humans.

* Robot Turtles was a kickstarted code-teaching board game that became popular enough to become a ThinkFun staple (you can tell because of how cheap it is).

Re: GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell

#42

Post by mathieu_joly » Wed, May 25, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

mathieu_joly wrote: post #40

I just made the first 10 missions on a Mac. It's all in French, which is not a big deal for me, and I confess it's pretty fun!

In a similar fashion and great for wannabes would be Hacknet, but unfortunately less challenging... https://store.steampowered.com/app/365450/Hacknet/

Re: GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell

#43

Post by TulliusCicero » Wed, May 25, 2022, 4:36 PM UTC

vultour wrote: post #35

curioussavage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I never heard of any textbooks gain significant popularity either. I guess reading textbooks attracts audience with low motivation. In seriousness though why do you think any educational game would ever gain popularity anywhere close to popular video games.And what the popularity of the material even have to do with the motivation of its consumers???

There are (used to be?) widely recommended books for certain topics, such as K&R's "The C Programming Language". I don't think any programming games are anywhere near the popularity of these books.

I think CodeCombat is pretty widely recommended specifically for teaching coding to kids. Not sure if it counts -- it's more coding lessons that are gamified in overall structure, and also the lessons themselves have gaming aesthetics (e.g. "Write code to move your hero to kill these orcs and open treasure chests").

There's a ton of resources for this area now though, I'm not sure I can point to any one thing as a standard.

Re: GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell

#44

Post by shadowofneptune » Wed, May 25, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

kulikalov wrote: post #12

I saw many games trying to teach programming, but never heard of any of them gaining significant popularity. I wonder why? I guess "play games instead of reading books" idea attracts audience with low motivation?

Games which present you with a text box and ask you to write in a language to solve a problem feel too much like being tricked into eating your vegetables. That's not saying that programming games can't work, but thinking about it as programming can get in the way. Dijkstra's famous quote is that computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, and games are proof of that.

Factorio is often given as an example of managing complexity, as another response said. TIS-100 has the aesthetics of assembly programming but the substance is actually a game that teaches hardware parallelism. Even something as simple as having students act out the 'dining philosophers' problem can be thought of as a game.

Re: GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell

#45

Post by lordgrenville » Wed, May 25, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

marcodiego wrote: post #34

RALaBarge wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is your friend https://www.unix.com/man-page/bsd/1/LEARN/

Sure. I just couldn't think of a way to convince google to find the right answer. Anything like "on unix learn tool" or "unix learn command" wouldn't bring me it. What search did you use to find it on google?

Not OP but I found this with "unix man learn" (without the quotes). It took a few tries though.

Re: GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell

#46

Post by lordgrenville » Wed, May 25, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

lapinot wrote: post #37

Layke1123 wrote: post #25

If you dont like running foreign code on your machine, you can run docker and then run foreign code on your machine. Did anyone else catch this in the article? Doesn't it seem like this makes it even more likely to get infected? No one understands Docker in entirety let alone this random game. It seems like all this stuff should just be automatically done behind the scenes and yet it's not.

^ bot? Doesn't make any sense to me, OP link is not an article.

Their first line is a quote from the README.

Re: GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell

#47

Post by f0e4c2f7 » Wed, May 25, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

aronhegedus wrote: post #38

I really liked https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ when I was starting out! Basically 30 levels of capture the flag, starting with `ls -lrth`, then going up to scanning ports etc

Wow this seems really cool especially as a teaching tool. Will take a look later, thanks for sharing.

Re: GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell

#48

Post by disintegore » Wed, May 25, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

Oh, hey, I used that. During the OS 101 course at UQÀM. It was alright. Less of a game and more of a tool to wrap around learning exercises though.

Re: GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell

#49

Post by rustyminnow » Wed, May 25, 2022, 6:26 PM UTC

schwartzworld wrote: post #22

kulikalov wrote: post #12

I saw many games trying to teach programming, but never heard of any of them gaining significant popularity. I wonder why? I guess "play games instead of reading books" idea attracts audience with low motivation?

We all have different ways of getting motivated and learning. You shouldn't yuck other peoples' yum. I've definitely heard of some games that teach programming skills getting popular. For example, https://flexboxfroggy.com/ http://www.flexboxdefense.com/ for teaching css layout. https://www.freecodecamp.org/ isn't marketed as a game, but absolutely feels like one when you are going through the program. https://www.ha…

I really liked https://mastery.games/flexboxzombies/

Re: GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell

#50

Post by Annatar » Wed, May 25, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

havblue wrote: post #27

Annatar wrote: post #3

Maybe before starting to teach others, you should teach yourself how to cleanly package your software into OS packages, instead of peddling around MS-DOS style shell scripts with a .sh extension. Didn't anybody teach you that UNIX-like operating systems purposely do not use extensions, in order to abstract the implementation language of the executable from the user? How the hell are you going to properly teach others…

I'm confused as to why you're choosing this hill to die on. I also use ".sh" at the end of bash script files for usability: at a glance it's obvious how run "build.sh" and exactly what it does without the person building it having to read a readme or an email that you authoritatively sent months ago regarding the optional build processes.

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