FLAGSHIP GAME: A PAN-EUROPEAN CROWDCODING EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT INTED-2015 presentation http://iated.org/concrete3/view_abstract.php?paper_id=42590 Coding has been recognized by educators to be a fundamental skill for everybody. The awarness campaigns launched worldwide in the last years, like Computer Science Education Week and Europe Code Week, have attracted the attention of media and initiated many people of all ages to programming. The availability of online visual programming platforms (like Scratch and Blockly) and freely accessible playful educational tools (like the ones offered by Code.org) have significantly contributed to lower the access barrier to coding, making it possible to acquire computational thinking skills while playing, with no need to study the syntax of any programming language. The widespread diffusion of internet connected objects with embedded processors has added to the power of coding, making it the essential skill that allows us to exploit the unprecedented potential of all the smart objects around us. Nowadays, online visual programming platforms for mobile applications make it possible to use block-based programming to develop full fledged mobile applications, thus combining the immediacy of visual programming with the attractiveness of mobile applications. A pan European crowdcoding educational experiment was launched in October 2014, during Europe Code Week 2014, to involve people with no programming skills into the development of a new mobile game for Android, called Flagship, to be officially released by the European Commission to promote computer literacy. The specifications were disclosed at the beginning of codeweek and the fist full fledged version was released on the last day, as a result of an international coding relay race involving more than 500 people from 38 countries. The University of Urbino took care of merging all the contributions and conducting the live coding sessions corresponding to the milestones of the roadmap. AppInventor was adopted as a development platform in order to make all coding steps accessible to neophytes. Programming phases was streamed live and recorder. Both the video logs and the incremental AppInventor project files were made available online to be used as tutorials. This paper reports all the details of the crowdcoding experiment, discusses motivations and results, points out the main strengths and weaknesses, and outlines the current status and future directions of the Flagship project.

1. Alessandro Bogliolo
CodeWeek Ambassador
DiSBeF - University of Urbino
NeuNet
http://flagshipgame.eu/
Flagship Game:
A Pan-European Crowdcoding
Educational Experiment
INTED 2015 – Madrid, 3 Feb 2015

2. Objective
Coding literacy campaign
CodeWeekEU 2014
Pan-European collaboration
Hands-on coding experience
Challenges
A new type of mobile game (easy to be spread)
Developed in a week by absolute beginners

3. CrowdCoding
Open spec of a new type of mobile game
Incremental releases
Live coding sessions based on Ai2 and video logs
CodeWeek edition for Android in 1 week
Engagement
Challenge

4. Open Spec
Flag Sorting Game
A given sorting criterion
alphabetical order used by default
16 flags randomly taken from a set of 38
Random positions in a 4x4 grid
A challenge
tap the flags in the proper order in
minimum time, according to the sorting
criterion proposed
http://flagshipgame.eu/specs/
FLAG SORTING GAME
PLAY
RESTART HINT
HINT
CHALLENGE: Sort Flags by:
Alphabetical Order
SCORE
BEST 12,340,100,142
34,242,106
NEXT
TIME
Italy
74 secs

5. Open Spec
Correct tap
The first tap is always correct
The n-th tap is correct if the sorting
parameter associated with the
tapped flag is greater or equal
than that associated with the
last tapped one
At the n-th correct tap, number n is
displayed near the tapped flag
FLAG SORTING GAME
PLAY
RESTART HINT
HINT
CHALLENGE: Sort Flags by:
Alphabetical Order
SCORE
BEST 12,340,100,142
34,242,106
NEXT
TIME
Italy
74 secs
1
2

6. Open Spec
Wrong tap
At each tap, the value of the parameter
associated with the tapped flag is
displayed
A tap is wrong if it is not correct, i.e., if
the value of the parameter
associated with the tapped flag is
less than the one associated with the
last tapped flag
When a wrong flag is tapped, it simply
disappears from the grid
FLAG SORTING GAME
PLAY
RESTART HINT
HINT
CHALLENGE: Sort Flags by:
Alphabetical Order
SCORE
BEST 12,340,100,142
34,242,106
NEXT
TIME
Italy
74 secs
1
2
Estonia

7. Open Spec
Game Over
The game is over when all the flags
have been tapped once
FLAG SORTING GAME
PLAY
RESTART HINT
HINT
CHALLENGE: Sort Flags by:
Alphabetical Order
SCORE
BEST 12,340,100,142
34,242,106
NEXT
TIME 74 secs
1
2
3
4 5
6
7

8. Open Spec
Score
Size of the search space
There are 16! (i.e., more than 1020
) different ways of sorting 16
flags
The maximum achievable score is 16!
The first tap is always correct and sets the score to 1.
At the n-th correct tap the score is multiplied by n
To achieve the highest score, all the flags have to be
tapped in the proper order in less than 1 minute

9. • 38 CodeWeekEU countries (28 EU countries + 10)
• 16 combinations of a given set of 38 flags
N1 = (38 choose 16) = 38!/(16!*22!) = 22,239,974,430
• Permutations of the 16 choosen flags
N2 = 16! = 20,922,789,888,000
• Number of different instances of the game:
N1 x N2 = 465,322,312,113,382,000,000,000 = 4.65 x 1023
Same order of magnitude:
Stars in the universe
Atoms or molecules in a mole of a given substance
Open Spec
Challenge

10. Incremental release
An application stub was released on the Google Play store
before the beginning of the actual development
A new (working) release was uploaded after each
development step
End-users could both contribute to the development and
watch the game take shape in their hands by installing
updates on their smartphones

11. Live coding sessions
Ai2 was used as a development platform
– Visual programming
– Cloud-based environment
– Android platform
Coding sessions streamed live step by step
Video logs available online together with project files

12. CodeWeek edition
http://flagshipgame.eu/roadmap/
Pre-release published on October 2, 2014
Specs disclosed on October 11, 2014
Codeweek edition released by Neelie Kroes on October 16, 2014
10 incremental releases
8 hours of video tutorials

13. Engagement
http://flagshipgame.eu/join/
Many different forms of engagement:
• Attendance of FlagShipEU events
• Coding
• Testing and debugging
• New sorting criteria
• Translations
• Contests
1,300 downloads of the spec
500 active participants

14. http://goo.gl/iATQ9v