In June 2017, the Department of Education and Science of the Odesa City Council appealed to the management of the Odesa National Polytechnic University with a request to participate in solving the following problem. In August, more than 300 schoolchildren spent their holidays at the Odesa City Children's Health and Sports Complex "Victoria" under the thematic program "Young IT Specialists". Classes had to be conducted in a multitude of groups of 28 schoolchildren, lasting up to 45 minutes, in a classroom with a projector and 5 computers. Various solutions to the problem were considered, but taking into account the specified limitations, the GameHub-ONPU team, having studied the training modules on computer game development they were preparing, chose a solution without the use of computers in the form of an educational tabletop card game based on the "Golem Battle" game, involving the construction of robot control algorithms.
The new game scenario linked the history of the creation of Charles Babbage's first mechanical computer, the first computer program written by Ada Lovelace, and a series of satirical science fiction stories by Stanisław Lem about the adventures of the robot inventors Trurl and Klapaucius, when in the distant future they found a mechanical computer and, without long
http://gamehub-cbhe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ONPU_338-768x493.jpg 768w, found a mechanical computer and, without long thinking, assembled two mechanical robots from it to conduct algorithmic tournaments.
Perhaps the Krakow GameHub team with Katarzyna Zofia Gdowska knows more about Stanisław Lem's stories, but today the Odesa GameHub team took on the gamification of the robots' new adventures, and in the process of the project team's work (Oleksandr Blazhko, Deputy Director of the Institute of Computer Systems, Tetiana Luhova, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, and her colleagues from the Department of Documentation and Information Activity Serhii Melnyk (Sergej Melnick), Mariia Yakubovska (Marie Jakubowska), and Viktoriia Sikorska), a new design for robot figures, the game board, and cards was developed, as well as tokens, and the control rules were improved. The 7 assembled game sets allowed for organizing the game for 7 teams of 4 schoolchildren, playing in pairs as Trurl and Klapaucius's robot clones.
On August 8, 10, and 17, GameHub-ONPU project participants Oleksandr Blazhko and Tetiana Luhova conducted 45-minute presentations of the game for six groups, which allowed more than 150 schoolchildren aged 9-14 to learn about programming in the unconventional form of the "Algorithmiada of Mechanical Robots" tabletop game , where the children had to use unconditional, conditional, and cyclic operations for turn-based robot control.
But the teachers themselves also gained valuable knowledge. For example, to the question asked to the schoolchildren, "Who are robots?", a simple answer was received in all groups: "They are creatures without a soul."
Unfortunately, the most important stage of marketing the game did not make it into the project. But at the meeting with the last group of schoolchildren, several children asked a marketing-optimistic question: "Where can one buy the game?"
The results of the conducted classes will be used by Tetiana Luhova in the "Computer Game Design" training module currently under development, which is oriented towards the unemployed at employment centers, as well as bachelors of humanities and IT specialties, in accordance with the plans of the Erasmus+ KA2 project "GameHub: University-Enterprise Cooperation in the Game Industry in Ukraine".
