Poison

My sister teaches math at Brandeis University and pitched me this little game that she is using to teach students about math via coding or something like that. She can comment if she feels the need to correct or explain. I felt I’d give it the time of day as a little bonus for you.

 

They are using the program Scratch, which was developed at MIT and designed to teach coding to kindergarteners. You can download it for free here.

First of all, where the hell was this program when I was a lad?! I don’t know jack about coding and I am beginning to believe that I was cheated on my education. I mean, I never even read Lord of the Flies let alone learned how to do basic coding!

Second…there is no second. On we go.

So this is a little game called Poison. My sister did the coding for this particular version, though she got the concept from here and she is pretty sure it’s a very common teaching tool. Trying to give credit where it’s due.

The game basically works like this: there is an evil wizard who wants to play a mean game with his tasty crab friend before he kills him (presumably to cook and eat him ‘cause he’s so tasty). The wizard presents the crab with a random number of coins and tells the crab he (she?) can take either one or two coins after which the wizard will take one or two coins then the crab again and so on until all of the coins have been taken. But there is a catch! The last coin is poisoned (which doesn’t really make a lot of sense unless the crab is eating it. Though I suppose it could be absorbed through the shell, but that seems unlikely and I don’t really know what a crab would want with these coins anyway...). The end result is whoever winds up with the last coin loses the game.

Now, my sister swears that you can win the game and that the game is, in fact, generally more likely to be in your favor, but I could not win once. Every time I played, the wizard would get me down to the point where he had four coins left and it was my turn. I don’t know if you see the outcome there, but short of the wizard messing up I’m basically boned.

I’m not entirely sure this is something we want to be teaching children.

Happy Thoughts: The game doesn’t take long at all. I mean, you could play it several times in ten minutes (by “play” I mean “lose”). Also, the artwork in this particular version is so goofy that I didn’t care that I was losing. Apparently, it’s just stock artwork from the Scratch program. Awesome.

Sad Thoughts: Why is the wizard so mean? And why can’t I win this? I swear it is an exercise in futility. It is the Kobayashi Maru of children’s video games.

The Bottom Line: This barely counts as a game, but it is a fun exercise and it will cost you absolutely nothing to play it so why don’t you go check it out?