We created Haathi Mera Saathi (My Elephant Friend), a board game to introduce fundamentals of programming to children and young adults (our youngest student was 8 and the oldest was 22). The game’s title is a homage to the eponymous and famous Hindi children’s movie from the 1970’s. Here, the child takes on the role of the mahout and the game master moves a toy elephant across cells in a grid following the instructions given by the child (in the form of command cards, “go forward”, “turn right”, “eat” etc). Key concepts like loops and conditional branching are taught in an engaging series of exercises where the child “programs” the elephant to eat bananas and avoid obstacles like trees.
A sample challenge in HMS solved by using loop structures
The game subscribes to Seymour Papert’s idea of educational tools needing to have “low floors” i.e the game should accessible by almost anyone with no demand for prior computing experience. The symbolic language and metaphors were designed on the ground with feedback from users on the field.
The HMS board game is presently being augmented with a PC/Mobile phone game environment (see pictures below), where children are gradually introduced to advanced programming media, being able to program a virtual elephant using Google’s Blockly visual programming environment and the Python language for more advanced learners.
