Char(66) Char(66) Char(81) ... lawn game?

May 5, 2014 12:14 PM

"WORLD'S NERDIEST LAWN GAMES" ...channel your CS literacy and supreme creativity (coupled with love of croquet) and help me create a relatively simple lawn game with a computer programming theme!

Parameters:

++Group of 6-12 people
++Ages 11-Adult (very bright 11 year old)
++OK to be active, no significant physical limitations in group
++1/4 acre of lawn available...i.e. enough for croquet, not frolf
++requires little by way of crafty preparation (I don't do pinterest.)
++tie in topics in Weeks 0 - 4 of CS50x. E.g. Basic C: Arrays. Sorting. Pointers. (GAH! POINTERS! WHY DO YOU PLAGUE US??)


I'd like to think this should be a relatively easy prospect for the brilliant hivemind. If I wasn't going off 9+7 months of extreme sleep deprivation, I'd like to think I'd have a delightfully geeky idea of my own. Oh well. I've got 18 more birthdays for those...

A clever adaptation on croquet, cornhole, lawn golf is where I'm starting from...

Thank you!!

posted by keasby to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (5 answers total)

I don't know exactly how maybe you incorporate Conway's game of life into your game some how. Move the croquet wickets in a life pattern or something every few turns.
posted by ill3 at 12:19 PM on May 5, 2014

Once you get three or four different game ideas, tweak the rules a little so they call each other as subroutines. If you have to pass parameters from one to the other, so much the better.
posted by flabdablet at 12:54 PM on May 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

If you were to mark the wickets in pairs (using colors or flags or something) then you could implement the "pointer" idea by laying out a regular-ish course with the pairs not too close together. When you aim to go through a colored wicket, you actually stop the ball in the center of the wicket, carry it to the paired color and place it in that center wicket and then give it a hit so it goes through.

Sort of like the secret passageway in some of those drop-candy video games - it goes in here but comes out there.
posted by CathyG at 1:57 PM on May 5, 2014

For arrays - one of the wickets would be set up such that there are 5 additional wickets (each with their own target) immediately after of it. Your ball goes through the main wicket, then you must stop, place the ball in front of the first secondary wicket and aim for its target; achieving that, you pick up your ball and do the exact same thing for the second secondary wicket and target, and so on through all 5 of them - since an array would apply the same function to each member in the array.

I'll try show the wickets visually (a capital C is a wicket; capital O is a target:
The ball would be coming from the left edge toward the right. It goes through the main wicket, then stops and goes through each wicket of the array.

C O

C O

C C O

C O

C O

The target could be a ring of colored string on the grass. One for each secondary wicket; the player has to go through the wicket and make it in to the target circle.
posted by CathyG at 2:09 PM on May 5, 2014

Bah - I can't get fixed width text to work. That third line should have the first C much farther to the left in a column by itself, and all the other C's are lined up in a column a few spaces after it.
posted by CathyG at 2:16 PM on May 5, 2014