SoftwareBall

[Olivier AZEAU]

Hello,

I just joined the group and wanted to share an unplugged game that you might find of interest : http://www.softwareball.org/index.en.html
I presented this game in some software development conferences and got feedback that it could be an interesting way to learn computer programming.

When creating this game, my primary focus was not about computer science but software development. When I say software development, I mean the "social" process where users have needs and some programmers help to fulfill these needs.
In SoftwareBall, a user wants a ball to go through a given path across the playground and the programmers need to program themselves (they become "human programmable components") to move the ball around.
But the user needs are likely to evolve. The path of the ball then need to be changed and this can only be achieved by the programmers adapting their code.

The scoring system of the game is designed such that when the programmers fulfill the user needs, they score points and the more they need to change their code, the more they lose points.
As a consequence, the way to highest scores is to

• create adaptable components that can be easily re-arranged when the user needs change
• not over-generalize when simple code does the job
• keep a clean code base (for example, no code duplication) to avoid costly code changes

So far, most of the people who played this game were working in the software industry. Some were programmers, some were not. Those who were not (business analysts, graphic designers, project managers, etc.) found in this game an interesting way to be in the programmer's shoes and to face coding challenges with no strong technical background prerequisites.

If you want to see more about SoftwareBall, you can have a look at

• the player sheet : http://www.softwareball.org/resources/en/player_sheet.pdf
• the game setup sheet : http://www.softwareball.org/resources/en/setup_sheet.pdf

All the materials are free to use and share for any purpose.
Please keep in mind that these files are mere translations from my French native language.

As I have almost zero experience in this area, could you please let me know if you think such a game, maybe with some adaptations, might be of use in computer science teaching/learning?

Regards,
Olivier
http://agilitateur.azeau.com/