On my lookout for games to help us with coding, and to better understand the concept of coding I found 'Robot Turtles'. Initially I had my doubts, for instance, how is a board game supposed to help with coding? Isn't coding all computer based? However, I was in for a surprise!
The idea behind the game
When someone first mentioned the word 'coding' I froze with fear, simply because, I had no idea what coding was, and the fact that it was a 'big thing' worried me....how does one teach something when they have no idea? It was a late night google search that enabled me to stumble across 'Robot Turtles', and I didn't look back!
The game itself is simple enough, honestly I was a little stressed, assuming I would have zero idea how to play and what to do. it was nice to see that the game works on ability levels, so start at basic level and work your way up.
For the basic level, the board is set using only the robot turtle tiles and the jewel tiles. Each player has their bug tile and a deck of code cards. The aim of the game is to move the turtle across the board to the jewel tile. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, to be fair it is simple as long as you don't confuse your left and rights and remember that you have to use a code card for each move. It might be as simple as "forward, forward, forward, left, forward, forward..." and so on. The idea is simple, enabling children to grasp the importance of how coding works, each instruction needs to be given. That is the building block of coding, and without understanding that it gets difficult to understand how coding works.
Once you and your child/ren have mastered the basic level, it's time to have some more fun with the more complex levels. For these, the board can be set up in multiple ways, but using the stone walls, ice walls and crates. We started with one obstacle at a time, in order to not confuse ourselves (or maybe it was me worrying more about my confusion levels!). With the ice walls, you introduce the cool laser move! You can melt ice walls using the laser. Stone walls and crates can't be moved or destroyed, using more thinking and logic on how to reach the jewel.
As children master through the levels, you then take away the idea of moving the turtle card with each code card selected, and allow the children to come up with the program they think should work. This is the children's turn to test their program writing skills (and yours!), once they have a program, they lay their code cards in a line and 'Run program'.
The final, probably the most difficult part of the game, is using the 'function frog'. For us, this was an interesting point, we've looked at functions on various coding apps, so had a vague idea of what it meant. Little person used to play this game a lot when younger, but it seemed to complex at the time to introduce 'function frog' so today was perfect! What is 'function frog'? He simply is a frog (amongst his turtle friends) who writes a repeating sequence. The aim of using the function, is to reduce the number of code cards being used (and if you were writing a code, it would mean writing out less codes). We had a jolly laugh with our 'function frogs', and little person managed to write a program using function frog enabling his turtle tile to reach the jewel and back home!
We still need to build on our skills using 'function frog', we haven't incorporated it within the main program using the more difficult board set up, so I am thoroughly looking forward to that (nervous giggle).
I love this game, and I am forever grateful to the person whose blog I stumbled across and read about it! Sometimes, everything good and about coding sounds like it needs to be screen based, but this game and Detective Dot have been a refreshing change!
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