I Made A Coding Card Game!

Ben — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 14:47:31 +0000

I Made a Coding Card Game!

If there are two things I love doing in this world it’s playing board games and programming. So, as a maker of things, and with the help from some very awesome people, I did the only logical thing and combined the two. Here enters (gallops? swoops?) Unicorn Ninjas.

Over the course of a year this game has seen a lot of action out here in sunny South Korea. It visited my table to entertain friends visiting from abroad, helped teach kids at an international school in Seoul, made its way around board game design meetups, and even was put through its paces as kindergartners played it as a matching game to learn about websites.

Unicorn Ninjas is easy to learn and unique to play. Our core goal was to make a fun game, with education coming in a close second. We didn’t want it to be too heavy, and our hope is this can be a stepping stone for anyone who wants to get a better grasp on how web pages work under the hood.

I think that developing a working vocabulary is the first step in taking on something new. Through this game, players build their terminology by using cards like “Navbar”, “Headers and Paragraphs”, “Image or Video”, and “Button”. These are terms I use everyday as a web developer. Players also get to “build” site cards (i.e. general patterns you can see in websites) to get points and also, perhaps subconsciously, link how HTML elements are the building blocks of sites.

This is the core premise: the more you play, the more familiar you get with using HTML terminology and experience how these pieces can be stacked together to create websites. Repetition makes remembering these HTML elements easier, and a comic booklet that comes in the game allows for easy access to realize what’s happening under the hood of your favorite websites in an accessible way. We want to make learning almost an afterthought, an invisible action that loops every time you play.

The real fun starts with bluffing cards and bugs, which you can check out here https://www.unicornninjas.net/rules/

^^^(His mistake was my victory XD)

If you’re interested in this thought experiment turned real, check out our Kickstarter.

For more info, follow us on our FB / IG or check out our website.

Tutorials and Expiration Dates

Ben — Sun, 11 Nov 2018 13:16:12 +0000

For the past half year or so I’ve been lucky enough to have worked on an ASP.NET project from the safe confines of well defined requests from the client and mentorship from a veteran programmer. Learning this way is great, and I get a feeling of comfort knowing that any dire problems can be clarified by either talking to my mentor/boss or talking with the client directly. This is like being in an insulated heated gazebo during a steady storm, with beer and munchies at the ready.

Learning on the internet is more like being thrown into a massive bazaar where sometimes the people are trying to sell you on following their tutorials or instructions that may have been written four years ago with dependencies glowing a red hue of security flaws. Others may have tantalizing titles and recorded demos, but an hour in you find that their code is missing crucial parts, or that other dependencies have been updated causing breaking changes. I call these kinds of problems expiration date problems and this has been my experience as I’ve embarked on learning Angular 7 in the wild.

How can you filter tutorials and guides to get a better experience and waste less time?

There are so many awesome tutorials out there that it can be overwhelming. So, how can you filter tutorials and guides to get a better experience and waste less time? To that I say, exactly. Filter and common sense are your two best buds. When looking on YouTube, filter tutorials that have been created a month or less ago. As for common sense, consider what level you are in the language. Are you a beginner? Then a 6 minute video claiming to create a MEAN Social Network app is probably going to either be sped up or just highlighting the conceptual things you need to know, not the step by step approach to get you used to the language/framework. The hour and ten minute video uploaded about CRUD operations is probably the better way to go. Next check the comments (also common sense). Are a lot of people noting how they couldn’t get the app to work without any kind of resolution from the uploader or other peers? That’s a big enough red flag to toss it. Last, check the date. Web technology is moving so fast that something from 6 months ago may be completely unused or changed so completely to be unusable. My rule of thumb, is to treat it like milk times four. If it’s a month old, it’s good. Anything more than that and you’re pushing your luck.

TL;DR -Check the tutorials comments section / length (if it’s a video) and draw conclusions from common sense -If it’s more than a month old it’s entirely possible that it’s not going to work

Stay salty out there my fellow web enthusiasts

DEV Community: Ben

I Made A Coding Card Game!

I Made a Coding Card Game!

Tutorials and Expiration Dates

How can you filter tutorials and guides to get a better experience and waste less time?

TL;DR -Check the tutorials comments section / length (if it’s a video) and draw conclusions from common sense -If it’s more than a month old it’s entirely possible that it’s not going to work