We all know learning games, bright coloured collection of apples and hearts on a kindergarten background, designed for a five year old, right? Here is a learning game that will change your choice of job for good - it's called Robot Odyssey.
The game doesn't have much of a story - your main character falls off his bed and down on the floor and finds himself in a city by the robots, and for the robots. At the beginning of your quest, to return to human world, you find three robots - Checkers, Scanner and Sparky. These robots will be your tools to complete the game. Those robots are wired for simple tasks - traversing the room in certain fashion and can grab objects under strict conditions.
The game begins quite easily - you walk through the maze and enter a room guarded by a century that will not let you in, you choose appropriate robot that fetches the guarded object and you move on. Sounds bit boring so far? Here comes the fun part, after a while you hit a problem - here comes a room that none of the robots can explore, you can't enter and you really need the guarded object. This is the stage the game begins to change your perception towards the world of electronics - you begin to re-wire your robots for performing various non-linear tasks, conditioned movements and later in the game even cooperation between the robots!
You have a toolkit filled with logical gates and a solder pen. When you enter a robot in order to re-wire it you discover that all three of the robots consist of identical structure - left, right, top and bottom thrusters and touch sensors, an antennae and a grabber. It has also a battery (which can run out dry on you), power switch and a periscope. Let's say you need your bot to go straight, straight, left, towards the object grab it and return - simple task, so you begin: activate right thrusters by connecting power source and the bot moves. It passes by the object and gets stuck on the left wall. Not good. You activate the grabber to operate on touch, and to activate left thrusters when the grabber catches something, and let the robot do his thing. The robot moves left, grabs the object, activates left thrusters ... And stays in place, because left and right engines now negate each other. Here is when you begin exercise your grey matter: you need each thruster to work some time and stay idle the rest of the time - you need logical circuit.
Your decision point is the grabbing, you need one thruster to work before and the other after this mark, but the grabber has only one output, and here comes your first logical gate - NOT. It's function is simple - one input, one output, if the input is active - the output is idle and visa versa. Back to the robot, you split the output of the grabber into two, and place NOT operand between the grabber and the thrusters , so now only one of them works - grabber idle - go left, grabber active - go right. Mission accomplished!
The further you go, the harder your tasks are - you now need additional sensors for zeroing in on objects, you need complicated circuitry to negotiate mazes and so on. You might think that OK. I don't know electronics , I can't play" and be wrong with it - the game offers step-by-step tutorial, describing the functionality of each component and the game itself is your testing grounds, where you gain knowledge through practice .
The game has no story, it has no music and beeps for sound effects, but I couldn't lay it off. Before I played this game, I knew nothing about electronics, now it's my main field of occupation and all thanks to this wonderful game.
Written by:
~Alvarin
