CodyColor: Design of a Massively Multiplayer Online Game to Develop Computational Thinking Skills

Computational thinking and coding-based problem solving are increasingly seen as crucial cross-disciplinary skills and an important part of a well-rounded education. Coding games and problem solving exercises have been growing in popularity. Many large-scale initiatives have been launched in order to bring these initiatives into classrooms, from preschool to secondary education. CodyColor is a simplified coding game, which takes basic programming instructions representing movements ("turn left" and "turn right") and represents them with color blocks. In contrast to most other coding games, color-coded programming relies on no symbolic interpretation on part of the player in order to be approachable by very young players as well. We present a massively multiplayer online version of CodyColor, discuss design and implementation specifics, and enumerate some of the possible game modes.