Motherboard Enigma (01.2004)
Educational Game using Turing
Members: BK Kim, Vincent Santos
Actual introduction .gif file of the game
Background:
This was a final summative project of the grade 10 Computer Engineering course. After two months of practicing and basic worksessions, we learned how to use Turing, a Pascal-like Object-Oriented programming language developed at the University of Toronto. Not only did we start off with "Hello World!", we also implemented a physical interface for user-interaction. We used a parallel cable, which has certain pins (do not remember which) soldered to certain LEDs on a bread to trainsmit 0's and 1's
Task:
To develop an educational game that is suitable for young people to learn various generic motherboard parts.
Project Overview:
95% of the work is done on computer, where me and Vincent had to program the game itself. The purpose of the interface board is just a response board, where you get the answer right, an appropriate LED will flash. Game was initially purely Type-and-Enter, where no mouse was used. But after some research, we found out the Graphical User Interface (GUI) can be implemented and Vincent did a great job organizing it. Since Turing does not support .JPEG, or .PNG image files, we only could use .BMPs and .GIFs. We also implemented sounds, where you will hear wrong buzzer sound for wrong answers and up-tempo beats for right answers. The introduction also feature some music that I don't remember at this point.
We came up with about 20 motherboard element questions, 10 for Noob (Easy) and 10 for Expert (Hard) level. Overall, it was a very successful project.
Documents:
General Outline
Actual Board (designed in Powerpoint)
Questions used