Let’s say you are 9 and you want to learn how to program … syntax is hard, and it is usually one of the issues I find when teaching. But also, language is problematic, not everybody speaks/reads/writes English and most programming languages are written in English … Arduino’s is not an exception. The guys at Complubot are into something interesting when it comes to learn programming. They are now in the third iteration of a cardgame (name to be decided)  using the Arduino syntax.

(c) 2010-2011 Complubot.org

The idea behind the game is simple. The players get some cards representing parts of a program and their goal is collecting points. You get one point for every card you put on the desk and twice as many if you are closing a command. The player with the bigger amount of points when someone is closing the loop is the winner. Closing the setup or loop functions will give you 10 points at once.

(c) 2010-2011 Complubot

Players are allowed to place cards on the desk as long as they are making sense with whatever has been placed already. E.g. you cannot build the line “digitalWrite( LUZ, valor );” if “LUZ” or “valor” haven’t been declared earlier on in the program.

I played one match this Saturday night and I realized how easy it becomes to discuss about programming when sitting around the table dealing with small Lego pieces as a currency. I could explain the idea of precompilation in a such an easy way that I am still amazed by it. Complubot is making a terrific job in teaching kids how the world of electronics works. Remember they are in a campaign to gather the funding they need to build their next generation competition robots. Just follow this link and send them some of your appreciation.

PS. as for the game, they will release it together with the design files once the rules are a more set, there are still some flaws that have to be polished :-)

PS2. more pictures can be found here.

PS3. yeah, I lost the game … I am pretty bad playing whatever game