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Gamified curriculum for computer science classes

UPDATE: I will give a talk about how to get students coding at the Digital Shoreditch 2013 festival.

Inspired by Ian Livingstone’s campaign to change the way computer science is taught in schools, I dreamed up my own little curriculum to get kids motivated about coding and software development. It’s pretty straight forward:

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Metrics dashboard using Google spreadsheets

At Robot Riot we needed a cheap and easy to setup metrics dashboard to access, visualize and share data generated by our first free-to-play browser game “The Big Catch“. Business analytics tools like Kontagent were way too expensive and overpowered for what we needed in the beginning. On the other hand, developing our own tool including a custom made web front-end was also not an option because of limited coding resources. So we went for a solution with an unbeatable price tag: Google Spreadsheets. In this article I want to share some of our learnings and also explain some basic metrics we track in our dashboard.

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Machinations: First steps

Update: This blog post has been featured on Gamasutra

Thanks to a recent feature on Gamasutra by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans and their book Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design (Voices That Matter) I discovered the fascinating world of Machinations diagrams. This tool really blew my mind because it provides game designers with a powerful new weapon of choice for analysing, prototyping, communicating and testing game mechanics without having to write a single line of code. That’s great because I am not a coder. Even better: I many cases I do not need a coder anymore for a first game mechanic prototype.

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