![]() However, emulators consume many system resources to emulate an OS and run apps on it. There are many free Android emulators available on the internet. Lightbot : Code Hour is an Android app and cannot be installed on Windows PC or MAC directly.Īndroid Emulator is a software application that enables you to run Android apps and games on a PC by emulating Android OS. ![]() In addition, the app has a content rating of Everyone, from which you can decide if it is suitable to install for family, kids, or adult users. Lightbot : Code Hour requires Android with an OS version of 2.3 and up. It has gained around 1000000 installs so far, with an average rating of 4.0 out of 5 in the play store. Although that’s not to say that programming games can’t get complex, as we’ll see in our next example.Lightbot : Code Hour is an Android Puzzle app developed by SpriteBox LLC and published on the Google play store. And when your program gets big enough, you shouldn’t need to visualise the whole state anyway: modularisation is an important part of programming later on, precisely because it allows you to consider one part in isolation of the others. As soon as you have more than a few variables (and maybe a data structure), the state becomes too much to visualise all at once. So why can’t all programming be like this? I think the answer is that programming all too quickly involves too much state to be visualised succinctly. LightBot and RoboRally both share these advantages of having highly visible state and allow easy understanding of what each instruction does. It’s no surprise that many teachers use LightBot as a good introduction to programming, especially for younger pupils. This makes it easy to understand what the instructions do, and easy to see where you are going wrong. The other benefits of LightBot are that the goal of each puzzle is clear, the behaviour of the robot and the correspondence to the instructions is clear, and the state of the world is simple and visible. The design of puzzle games is very similar to ideas in instructional design: you must slowly add new tools to the player’s toolbox and offer simple problems that demonstrate the use of each new tool, before you can then offer a problem that involves combining several of the tools. (Though I guess you could adapt RoboRally as a solitaire game…) LightBot has an explicit set of challenges that increase in difficulty and progressively introduce new concepts. ![]() RoboRally is a competitive game in which you must guide your robot around to the next checkpoint, dealing with the board obstacles. The major difference between RoboRally and LightBot are the overall setup. It’s quite a neat, simple addition that adds another concept (although there’s no parameterisation for the functions, which obviously limits them). LightBot makes their use necessary by having problems that require more instructions than you can fit in the normal program execution, thus requiring you to pull out parts into a procedure, and calling that several times. In terms of the programming mechanics, the main addition LightBot makes over RoboRally is the addition of functions/procedures. The interesting parts of LightBot are, therefore, where it differs from RoboRally. Hmmmm! I don’t know if LightBot was actually copied from RoboRally, but either way: the mechanics are very similar. In this post, I’m going to look at LightBot, a computer game involving programming a robot using simple commands like move forward, turn left, and so on. In my last post, I described RoboRally, a board game involving programming a robot using simple commands like move forward, turn left, and so on. Today: LightBot, a free online flash game. This series of posts looks at games that involve programming as part of playing them.
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