Lightbot is one of the most awesome flash games I have come across. Don't let the article title fool you into thinking that this is some geek stuff that requires technical knowledge. It doesn't. What it does require is the love for puzzles and/or free time to kill.
Lightbot is a brilliant introduction to programming for anyone who doesn't know how to write code and wants to learn. This game will teach you the fun in programming and help you see how programming is relevant to problem solving in everyday life. Also, any programmer who calls himself that should be able to finish the 13 levels in breeze. Else you should consider yourself another career.
You can directly play the game in the flash box below.
The objective of the game is to move the lightbot (the cute looking robot) to the blue square and light the square. This is done by providing commands to the robot. Once you command the robot to reach the blue square and light it, the playing field changes and obstacles are introduced in different styles in newer maps. The difficulty level increases as you progress (not everyone might agree to this) and simple but interesting programming concepts are introduced gradually.
The game screen has commands at the top in the form of icons. Commands are like: Turn right, turn left, jump, light the bulb etc. To command the robot, drag the icon into the main function (one command per tile, a total of 12 tiles available) in the order in which you want the commands to be executed. Click on "Go" to see the robot in action. If you make a mistake, you can always change the sequence of commands and try again by clicking "Stop" and "Go" again. As the levels progress you will notice that you will need more than 12 commands to get the lightbot to reach all the blue squares and light them up. So you put in the additional commands into either or both of the functions Funct1 and Funct2 provided and call them inside the main function by using the F1 and the F2 command icons in the main.
Like I said earlier, this truly is one of the best ways to introduce kids to programming and I feel bad about not having the opportunity to play a game like this as a kid when I was learning to program. Have fun. And remember, the boss is always looking from behind your shoulders when you are playing at work. But of course, your code is compiling.
Lightbot for the iphone/ipod touch is now available at the itunes store.
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