C-Jump - The Board Game!

Friday March 21, 2008

I'm on holiday (Spring Break, or as we British people call it Easter) until Tuesday so in the holiday spirit, here's something a little different. Want to teach your children the basics of computer programming? C-Jump is an educational boardgame for 2-4 players aged 11+. It teaches basic programming concepts like loops, branching, even switch statements while players compete in a downhill skiing game. "Race down a mountain, think like a computer program" is their slogan. When I first read this, the words "crash" and "break" sprang into my mind but it is a genuine fun and teaching tool. A teachers guide is also included on the website.

This is a genuine board game and the graphics look great. My interpretation of the game is that its loosely based on snakes and ladders. As in real life, you should avoid the Goto statements as they slow your progress! The game is based on the code of a real computer program and proceedings from the sale support an open source programming project- CTL - The Common Text Transformation Library. Located on sourceforge.net this is a set of C++ classes and functions to understand and modify text data. If you're interested in C++ text processing take a look- this looks interesting and there a a number of samples including HTML search and replace parsing among others. I've added ctl to the C++ Code Library.

The C-Jump website also includes some free downloads including a C++ Standard Library Tutorial to visualize and understand interaction between containers, iterators, and algorithms of the C++ Standard Library.