Programming Humans with Evil Squash

I’m gaining a new respect for board game designers. It turns out to be quite difficult to create rules for the games that are unambiguous and easy to understand. Even what I thought was a simple game, Evil Squash, has turned out to have some nasty edge conditions that we have had to think quite hard about.

Of course, a game design is really a “program for humans”. It is a sequence of instructions that involve the processing of data, with decisions and outcomes. The tricky part is that the rules are written in English, which is a language in which it is very hard to make yourself completely clear.

Perhaps as an introduction to programming we could get a bunch of people to design the rules for a game of some kind, and then “debug” it by playing the game. I’m certainly going to invent a new “imaginary” game for each first year programming course from now on, just exploring the rules and getting students to think about how they work has given a nice new dimension to the coursework.

You can find out more about the game itself at www.evilsquash.com.

Free Computing Books

Someone on the forum has posted a really good link to online computing resources. Thanks for that.

You can find the books here. And yes, the C# Yellow Book is in there…

DevXS 2011 in Lincoln

The University of Lincoln has organised a developer-fest this weekend and there are some Hull students in the mix too. The format is a bit like Three Thing Game, except that the event runs over three days and they are trying to do some useful things. It all looks great fun and you can follow the progress of the event here.

Happy Corduroy Day

I wore the Big Watch just so I could get this photograph.

Building a Robot Army

Spent some time this morning building robots. Actually I didn’t, students on a hardware interfacing course did all the hard work. They are all Fez Micro Framework powered and great fun. They are based on the same platform as Oscar, who has been all over the place with me over the last couple of years.

Next week we are going to get some C# code into them and get them running around the desks and not falling off the edge. Then we are going to get another Micro Framework board running and see if we can control them via the internet.

Great fun.