LightBot Game

Games have a rich tradition in education because they embody many positive principles that enhance learning, such as immediate feedback, increasing levels of difficulty, exploration, and motivation. Initially, many education games were so boring that companies shied away from saying their games helped people learn; now, the learning is so well embeded in the games that most people do not even know they are learning while playing!

Another feature of games is that their instant feedback encourages players to explore the world to figure out how things work rather than reading the "manual". That's because dying is not a big deal (and sometimes even fun :) and exploring is often part of the fun of the game. Thus, while playing this game, please spend some time exploring the world and the commands to see what kinds of things are possible in addition to just getting the "right" answer.

Light-bot is a fun little game that may seem simple, but foreshadows many interesting aspects of more sophisticated computer programming. It was programmed by Coolio Niato (aka Danny Yaroslavski), a 19-year-old college student in Toronto, Canada; the game was developed for Armor Games, an on-line game repository and player community, and is linked to by many other gaming forums.

The basic idea behind Light-bot is to move a little robot around a in a grid world; you “win” a level by lighting up all the special blue squares in the grid. The actual lighting happens when the bot squats on the squares via special command. The robots movements are controlled by a program which you “write” by dragging little command tiles into a scripting area of the interface.

Specification

Play all 18 levels in Light-bot's Hour of Code. The activity includes three categories, basic, procedures, and loops, that contain 7, 6, and 5 levels respectively.

At the end of each level, take a screenshot of your solution to include in your document or as a clearly named picture with your electronic submission of the assignment.