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131
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ranked #222,708 most helpful out of 571,544,897 reviews
★☆☆☆☆
A bad idea, badly executed
Thinkfun has produced some good puzzles, most notably Rush Hour, but this isn't one of them. It appears that someone decided parents would pay good money for a puzzle that claimed to help children develop computer programming skills, so they came up with this. But it's a puzzle, not an educational game. Any decent puzzle will get some brain cells moving and thus has some educational value, but this is fairly boring as a puzzle, and makes it a chore to learn the one basic coding concept that it revolves around. Flow charts, which are important in computer programming, are used in solving the puzzle. But the flow charts here are very simple, and the challenge is to fit your pieces into the flow chart that someone else has already drawn. This is mostly a tedious trial-and-error process, and doesn't do much to develop actual coding skills which involve the quite different job of figuring out what flow chart will get your job done. We could just as easily say that an alphabet book develops coding skills, because the letters A, B, and C are used as variables in many programs. The instructions are badly written; didn't it occur to anyone at Thinkfun to try them out on someone? In addition, it gussied up the game with irrelevant complications. The rules explain that red tokens run, green tokens slide, and blue tokens jump. Got that? But actually, it's irrelevant. They all just move in exactly the same way. The "art" backgrounds are uglier than I would have thought possible: computer-generated valleys and forests made of cubes, by someone who apparently learned all coding and no aesthetics. Finally, there are 12 action tokens, plus an avatar, all 13 of which are male. The copyright date is 2015. Enough said. If you'd like your children to learn coding skills, I recommend "Scratch," a free program created at MIT for just that purpose. (I have no connection with Scratch or MIT.) Or get them a good book and read or talk about it together, and trust that if and when the time comes that coding will be a good thing for them to learn, they'll be able to do so.
August 2018 · Toys and Games · verified purchase
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