New blockly maze - minified is not awesome

[Eric Eslinger]

Hey block-folks,

I just wanted to weigh in with some feedback. I understand that there's lots of reasons to minify your JS code for production, but previous iterations of the blockly games have been unminified, and that's no longer the case. 

I actually used that as a next-level lesson to my students who got through maze level 10 quickly: find other ways to get to the end or find a way to make more games. It's *hugely* empowering to discover that each web browser has a console and you can take apart running applications to see how they work, or at least you can poke them a little, but when they're minified it's a lot harder to do that. You used to be able to pull up interestingly-named variables attached to window like window.game.moveTo(x,y) and such.

I'll probably just end up forking the repo and running my own copy of the games on an appengine instance, but I wanted to put this piece of feedback in the stream.

e

[Neil Fraser]

As you've probably seen, Blockly Games can be run unminified by changing 'compressed' to 'uncompressed' in boot.js as described here:
https://github.com/google/blockly-games/wiki/Build#debug-mode

This would either involve running a local copy, or you could write a Greasemonkey (Firefox) or Tampermonkey (Chrome/Safari/Opera) script that makes this modification on the fly.

That you encourage your students to do this is awesome.  I wish there were more teachers like you.  That said, there are even more people using connections where the difference between minified and non-minified Blockly Games is the difference between playable and unplayable.  I just came back from Cuba where university CS students have a 10MB Internet quota per month.  After seeing that, I cranked up compression even further.

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Neil Fraser
https://neil.fraser.name

[Neil Fraser]

Minification may now be toggled by visiting /debug (online) or /debug.html (offline).  The setting lasts for the duration of your session (until the browser closes).

On 24 March 2015 at 08:15, Eric Eslinger <eric.e...@gmail.com> wrote:

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