Real-world debugging with CodeCombat
I’m in London for three days this week, which means I get an extra evening to play CodeCombat. This is good, as some of the kids in the Computing Club I run on a Monday are already ahead of me (including my son!)
What I’m enjoying about learning through playing a game is that I’m learning how to read code almost by osmosis. A great example of this was just now when I was convinced the code I’d written was correct. After a quick look on a forum, it turns out I was correct and there was a glitch on that level.
Let’s just unpack that for a second:
- I’ve become confident enough to know when my code should run properly and when it’s ‘not my fault’.
- I searched for other people’s experience facing the same problem.
- Having read through discussions, I found a workaround using Python.
- I converted the Python code to JavaScript in my head.
- Then I completed the level successfully.
From talking to people who code for their day job over the last few years, this sounds a lot like real world programming… 🙂
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