Bots & (Main)Frames
By New York University Tandon School of Engineering
Student Category
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Skills and Ideas Taught: Bots & (Main)Frames helps players develop programming and computational thinking skills by programming Robby the robot to navigate various obstacles.
Goal or Challenge: The goal is to improve the user’s skills in computational thinking.
Primary Audience: High school seniors and college freshman, targeted ages 17 – 19.
Assessment Approach: The player’s learning of the presented skills is measured by the completion of/progression through several sets of levels within the game. Levels 1-14 consist of introducing, developing and assessing the basic computational thinking skills of algorithm building, simulation, and debugging. Levels 15-24 consists of a simple introduction to programming and computational thinking control structures in the form of loops. Levels 25-34 consists of a simple introduction to programming and computational thinking abstraction in the form of functions. The last levels, 35-40, don’t teach any new skills, but present puzzles with the highest amount of difficulty in the game.
Description: The goal of the game is for players to program a robot to navigate a puzzle and reach various points indicated within. There are a total of 40 levels, each with increasing difficulty. The challenge arises from having to program the robot to reach every indicated point with a limited number of programming commands. This forces players to think carefully about what paths they should take through the puzzle and how to abstract the problem in a way that can be solved efficiently using loops and functions.
Game Engine: Flash
Operating System: Web
Platform: Needs Adobe Flash Player installed in the browser to play
Special Hardware: None