Tomorrow Corporation

Not sure if 7 is old enough, I made this card "game" with my daughter when she was 10: https://punkx.org/4917/ which is not really a game but more like a puzzle, you have 54 small programs for a 4 bit made up computer (Richard Buckland's computer) and you have to interpret them in your head or with pen and paper. It's quite interesting to play with her when I change few instructions on a card. (you can also print it yourself on a4 paper) Other interesting game are of course robot turtles (http://www.robotturtles.com/), but she might be too old for it. And you might like Mark Rober's https://www.crunchlabs.com/ There is human resource machine that my daughter played when she was 8 or so (https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine) which is a brilliant game. Also all kinds of "crypto" books, from caesar's cipher to morse code books were very interesting

If you like Factorio, you should also try "Human Resource Machine" by Tomorrow Corporation (https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine). I am not in any way affiliated with them, but I enjoyed it a lot, so would highly recommend.

And if you like it, then the sequel "7 Billion Humans" (https://tomorrowcorporation.com/7billionhumans) is fantastic, as it expands on the concept with parallelisation! I really enjoy playing them both every now and then. I found them to work really well on my Nintendo Switch, where I would just unplug the controllers and play them like a mobile game with the touch screen, as they are perfectly suited for that.

It really is an interesting game. I'd first started with this sort of genre playing Human Resource Machine, which simulates a single accumulator architecture, and very interesting set of puzzles. The puzzles really are just standard sorting, string reversal, prime factorization. The best part I find about it is the way Pointers and Memory allocation/access and stack access is done. I'd recommend this game very much as the puzzles aren't very hard and the progress is really satisfying. Shenzhen I/O is a great game too! But I got stuck at one point and as another comment points out, I also gave up on it. Maybe it's time to log into Steam. :) [*] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

Just to leave some suggestions of puzzle games that are little hidden gems and that provide great logic thinking training. IMO they should be played in the order below: 1) Blockly Maze game (free) (https://blockly-games.appspot.com/maze?lang=en) 2) Jelly no Puzzle (free) (http://qrostar.skr.jp/index.cgi?page=jelly&lang=en) 3) Human Resource Machine (paid) (http://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine)

There is a similar type game called Human Resource Machine[1] which I can also recommend. It's made by the same people who made Little Inferno. My one gripe with it however is that it takes the middle ground between teaching assembly to people unfamiliar with programming and those who already have some knowledge, and doesn't quite satisfy either. [1] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

3rd grade might be a bit young, but you can make simplified version of the 4917 computer https://punkx.org/4917/ and make few funny self modifying programs they can "compute" on pen and paper also maybe get few examples from human resource machine and play them out, this might be more fun than pb&j https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

There was this tech [1] making rounds on HN a while back. Made a big impression on me and it's by the company that co-created the World of Goo 2. I wonder if it was used to make the game. [1] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/posts/how-we-make-games-at-tomorrow-co…

You should have a look at Tomorrow Corps custom Toolchain[1]. It opened my eyes about how good things could be. [1]https://tomorrowcorporation.com/posts/how-we-make-games-at-tomorrow-co…

This is pretty much `assembly language the game`: https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine It's not a useful architecture, but it teaches the thought process really well, and you end up discovering a lot of optimization naturally. For this article, I'm measuring every step to see what the performance implications of the changes are, which, along with some educated guesses and some googling/reading other articles, was enough for me to figure out what was going on. In part two (https://owen.cafe/posts/the-same-speed-as-c/) especially, I didn't know what was going on with the benchmarks for a long time. Eventually I got lucky and made a change, which led to a hypothesis, which lead to more tests, which led to a conclusion.

Depends on the age? My sample size, granted only about a dozen of Commodore 64 and Apple ][ owners, says 100% got at least as far as typing programs in from magazines. More than half made programs to calculate things, about a third made their own video games. Of the total, at least half are engineering now (software, energy, communications), and the video game segment are software engineering leadership. It's not clear to me how to replicate this experience today, though I applaud games such as Human Resource Machine: https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine More, all over the map though: https://shecancode.io/coding-games I think there's something to be said for exposure to coding as a kind of digital literacy that should be required going forward, in a "WTF even is code anyway" sense.

Try programming 7 Billion Humans and you'll see why. https://tomorrowcorporation.com/7billionhumans

Is Human Resource Machine [1] basically also a stack oriented programming game, or am I confusing the physical stacks of paper you order the little guy to move around with computer stacks? [1] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

You could try educational games: Human Resource Machine covers processor level programming in a fun and quirky way and should be understandable by a 10 year old: https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine Screeps allows players to program little avatars in Javascript to do things in a virtual world: https://screeps.com/ If you search through the HN archives, it's been discussed before. Though it's nominally a MMO, buying just the base game allows playing in sandbox mode offline.

from this comment it looks like there is a different way to access the bundle that get's an updated link. in any case they are aware of the humble bundle and seem to promise to update that too: https://tomorrowcorporation.com/posts/world-of-goo-update-10-years-lat…

Well, that's how things work in Human Resource Machine [0] so it probably works well in reality too, right? [0] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

Very nice. If you like assembly programming games make sure to try Human Resource Machine[0] [0] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

Also related. You'd never guess it from the name but Human Resource Machine [1] is also a low level programming game. [1] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

If you're interested in this type of games… Look at any game from Zachtronics: http://www.zachtronics.com/ . Plus maybe Human Resources machines: https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

Depends on what level the students are and what depth you want to teach them at. It's really a puzzle game that happens to use an extremely simplified assembly language as its interface. Students would get the general flavor concepts of programming at the assembly language level but it's only coarsely similar to programming a real device. Moreover, the game is inherently multi-threaded, which adds a level of complexity. If your students are at the primary or secondary levels, a less complicated but similar game like "Human Resource Machine" ( https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine ) would probably be easier for them to grasp.

I consider it possible, and found a game that tries to teach one the concepts: Human Resource Machine[0] [0] http://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

If you want an alternative to the good suggestions that others have already provided, you might like the recent game "Human Resource Machine"[1], by the creators of "World Of Goo". As they describe the game: Your office is a simple computer. ... You might describe this machine as Harvard Architecture with a single accumulator. Don't think of it so much as a game, but a fun interactive CPU that you program in assembler. It starts with how to use basic opcodes (I/O, math) and registers ("save a copy on the floor"). Conditional jumps (w/ an implicit flag register) are gradually added, and later puzzles use indirect addressing a lot. [1] http://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

Thanks for pointing this out, I'm a big fan of Kyle Gabler's work on the soundtrack for World of Goo. He makes them both available for free download here: http://kylegabler.com/WorldOfGooSoundtrack/ http://tomorrowcorporation.com/little-inferno-soundtrack

I'll reply mostly on 2. - most of these were already mentioned in the previous thread - [0] Grasshopper, [1] SpaceChem (awhile ago), [2] 7 billion humans (haven't finished it yet, and haven't played for a while), [3] Human Resource Machine and [4] TIS-100. They mostly help to build habits, and persistency, not just being fun. The "real world" always provides much more interesting "gameplay", but it is sometimes with a too steep learning curve. :) Edit: And I've been ninja'd by another user, but just remembered that there is another in my wishlist - [5] Baba is you (haven't played it, though) [0] https://grasshopper.app/ [1] https://zachtronics.com/spacechem/ [2] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/7billionhumans [3] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine [4] https://zachtronics.com/tis-100/ [5] https://www.hempuli.com/baba/