Game: C-Jump

C-Jump is a board game designed to teach programming. Wait, what? A board game? Well.. yes, it's a board game and probably the only one that teaches this topic.

I found it quite interesting that someone desinged a board game to make it fun for kids to learn programming basics.

The gameplay is a pretty standard roll your dice and move your piece n spaces, whoever reaches the last space is the winner. The catch is that the board is made up of lines of code taken from the C programming language. Here's a pic of the board:

Each space line of code represents stuff that can will happen if you're standing on it when you throw the dice where X is the number you get. For example, if you are in a space that says "x+5" and you get a "3", you can move 8 spaces forward, or if you happen to land on an "if" space, the number you get will determine the path to follow.

Aside from simple arithmetic, the game also has the most common statements like if, else, switch, goto, break, continue, return, etc. The full board looks like this:

It's an interesting concept. I would need to play it to know if a game based almost entirely on luck would be fun enough to play it several times. At least, children that play it would actually be learning basic programming concepts.

Visit C-Jump's main page.

c-jump factory (2007). C-Jump