Simulations Я Us

Some of the most popular learning platforms I use, to teach coding, make it hard for would be game developers to create anything multi-user. Even the earliest MUD (multi-user domain) could do that. Those were the good old days right?

As of this writing, MIT Scratch has recently revamped. My students sounded lukewarm, but acknowledged the promise of new unexplored add ons. One of them paused to show me the Micro:bit module, and wondered aloud what it was.

“The BBC mailed a Micro:bit to every kid in England” I told the whole class. “Here in the United States, we don’t have any companies like the BBC, which both creates the national news shows and mails kids programmable devices.” I’m right about that no? True, some of our students have Amazon scholarships, but we’re hardly reaching out to a whole nation.

However, the multi-user domain is what we have anyway, if you think of the Matrix and our shared city streets. The worlds within the world idea is an old one, big in theater, pronounced in Shakespeare. These platforms have much to do with theater, as well as film. Sprites act in the foreground, against background stage objects. In Codesters, the stage is what listens for events, such as a pressed key, or a collision between sprites. If this happens then do that. Choreography.

Ideally, the goal is to get the students shifting the same mindset in and out of the computer, as you find queues both in design patterns in software, and everywhere else. In the regional dialect, people “line up” at the supermarket…