Code and Dungeons at Redlands

Working hard on dungeon design at Redland Libraries

Over the Christmas holidays I made the mistake of telling my fellow technology staff (read: nerds) of a little idea I had for our kids coding club this year. I wanted to rely less on computers and take things back to basics with a mostly offline activity that let kids get creative and learn at the same time. I was inspired by Dungeons and Dragons as well as my personal love of gaming, so I ingeniously called the project Code and Dungeons. My error was that I did not anticipate how overwhelmingly supportive and encouraging the team here at Redland Libraries would be. So suddenly my little idea became; this is awesome, let’s do this for term one, which starts in three weeks.

So I scurried back to my desk and in a few short weeks I had a room full of 10-14 year olds ready to be Dungeon Masters. First up each kid was given a blank A4 grid to turn into a dungeon. They filled in squares which became walls, water and gates as well as dragons, mermaids and ghosts. Each character and item had an allotted size and interaction, such as the dragon must to be hit twice by a sword to be stunned, and if you feed a mermaid an apple it will help you cross water safely. Over a few weeks each dungeon came together. Some were elegant and smart, with dead ends and backtracking needed to reach the end. Others where challenging, with four dragons placed one after another to create a scary and perilous path. Through this activity, the kids began to learn that the basics of game design does not begin with firing up a computer, but thoughtful planning on paper.

Once the last ghost was placed, each Dungeon Master wrote out their master code. This code was the best possible way to get from the start to finish of their dungeon. We used basic language as their ‘code’:

• Repeat x 4


• Move Forward


• Use item sword on dragon

The dungeons were blown up to A1 size and each Dungeon Master was given a Sphero and tablet.

They used the SpheroEDU app to block code the robot through their dungeon. It stopped at different creatures and items and indicated an interaction with coloured strobes, with a big spin and light display when it reached the end (as well as cheers from all of us!). Now the kids were learning a different coding language that used time and angles for movement.  Spheros proved challenging at times; not being the most accurate robots they occasionally struggled to correctly move through the whole maze, to the chagrin of us all. We rallied together through the enjoyable learning process.

One amazing dungeon design

Eight weeks flew by, it was brilliant to see the kids flex their creativity as well as learn some of the basic computational thinking skills that come with block coding. It was also fun and challenging for the staff, as this was the first test drive of this new program we all had to think on our feet, our poor sore feet.  Now we are back to the drawing board to see how we can improve for the next run, we are thinking different robots – maybe Mbots, digital design, and much bigger dragons.

Author

Rebecca Moore, Redland Libraries

Did you know your library can borrow digital literacy resource kits from State Library of Queensland ?

Kits for loan include:

• Sphero kit


• Skoog kit


• Makeblock kit


• Maker kit


• Gadget kit


• iHealth kit


• Ozobot kits


• EZ-Robot kit


• NAO kit