Teaching game logic with Google Blockly

My year 9 ICT class is currently learning game design. There has been a specific focus on learning the difference between game commands and game logic. I want them to understand that for each item of human input into a game there is a significant amount of game logic, and processing of that game logic, that occurs. This also has the side advantage of outlining to students why gaming machines need to be powerful in terms of processor and RAM.

We initially analysed snippets of side scrolling gameplay, identifying specific actions that require human input and mapping out the processes that represent game logic. The focus has been on the human controllable character currently. Last week I utilised Google Blockly, in particular the maze challenge, to further consolidate the difference between commands and logic.

Using Google Blockly required some preparation, as our default student system runs IE8. Google Blockly requires a browser capable of rendering HTML5 so to achieve this I installed the portable version of Mozilla Firefox on the network drive. There were issues with students trying to launch the portable version from the network with approximately 50% successfully opening Firefox. The program launch was delayed, sometimes up to 5 minutes. I am assuming this is due to numerous attempts to launch the same program off the network drive. A few students copied the installation to their local drives and the program launched as one would expect.

The concept of the Google Blockly maze is to build a script using the provided logic and commands that solves any of the mazes. Students quickly discovered they could solve a single maze by simply loading a list of commands, this required me to randomize the maze to illustrate to them that the same list of commands could not solve all mazes. I also purposely did not tell the students that aspects of the logic blocks could be changed. As the concept of testing scripts was important, this discovery would be more powerful if they achieved it independently.

Ultimately we spent 2 x 70 minute lessons on this activity. There was much discussion about solutions as they were developed and students were having conversations about errors in logic and the inefficiencies in grouping commands. The effective solutions all employed an "exploration" component in solving the mazes, and the smallest number of blocks used was 7. Personally, I could build a solution with 9 blocks.

This was an effective activity to reinforce the concepts of game logic, game commands and testing scripts. Next time I would ensure all students copied the installation folder of Firefox to their local drive before running the program.