I brought this up in a subthread, but thought it might be of more general interest to this audience.
When I was in gradeschool (about 3rd or 4th grade), there was a game available on the Apple IIe's made by The Learning Company called
Robot Odyssey. I didn't really understand it at the time, but recall having lots of fun playing with it.
Later, during my high-school years, I found it again for my TRS-80 Color Computer 2. This time I played the game to completion, getting through all five levels and back to freedom. In the course of completing this game, I learned almost as much digital logic as I did in my Intro to Electrical and Computer Engineering course in college.
The plot is simple: you have fallen into the sewers of Robotropolis, and are trying to get out of Robotropolis back home. In the very first room of the sewers, you find three robots. Along with your trusty toolbox and soldering iron, you can enter the robots and program them, by wiring up their thrusters and sensors to logic gates and flip-flops.
The first level, the sewers, requires no rewiring of the original robots, as you can solve all the puzzles in it using their pre-programmed state. The next four levels, however, involve wiring up the robots to solve an ever-increasing set of puzzles. Later levels include programing the robots to work together to solve puzzles.
The game came with a set of built-in tutorials, built using the standard game engine. They included lessons in Robot Anatomy, Robot Wiring, Sensors, the Toolkit, Robot Circuits, Robot Teamwork, and Chip Design.
Fortunately, there's been a port of this game to Java, so that anyone can play it:
DroidQuest. This is an extremely faithful port of the original game, and I played it through to completion after finding it. It was just as challenging as I remembered it being, and a lot of fun to play.
____________________________
Michael Welsh Duggan
(md5i@md5i.com)
