The Playful Coder: Exciting Games for Learning Programming Concepts

Ever felt anxious, bored or zoned out while coding? Trying to solve a problem but getting distracted? Unable to understand the problem statement and figuring out how to code? Let me help you solve this.

With the advancement of different coding platforms. We now have various resources to learn, collaborate and practice code efficiently. Even some of the top companies have been using these platforms to conduct coding rounds as part of shortlisting. Although this seems to be effective, most of the students who are coding in the initial phase might not enjoy it through the course of learning. To create the urge of solving a problem statement, to make the coding environment much more enjoyable and entertaining. Here are some of the websites which provide challenges or situations to which users are supposed to code. These games will not only help them code efficiently but also try to engage with them throughout the game.

1. CSS Diner:

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Diner is a front end-based game designed for educational purposes. This game focuses on improving some of the important concepts such as CSS Selectors, CSS properties and Selector Specificity.

In CSS Diner, we have 32 levels each containing different set of challenges on selectors. The goal of this game is to select the correct selector mentioned in the problem and apply the changes to successfully clear all the test cases. This game helps individuals who are beginning their journey in front-end development by creating an interactive and engaging environment.

2. Code Hunt:

Code-Hunt is a game developed and designed by students to make users fall in love with the code by solving puzzles or challenges set by the game.

Code hunt game focusses on various concepts in programming languanges such as loops, Iterators, String manipulation concepts and many more. In this game the player needs to write the snippets of the code to complete the given code in order to finish the level. This game contains two programming languages C# and java. Player can use any one of this to complete the challenge.

3. Check IO:

Check IO is an interactive and widely used coding game. Check IO is for beginner and advanced programmers who are willing to enrich their skills and engage in an adventurous game on coding.

Check IO provides to options in TypeScript and Python programming languages. This game contains 3 difficulty modes such as easy, normal and advanced giving variety of ranges for the users to participate. CheckiO covers various topics in python such as:
1. Basic Datatypes
2. Key Value Pairs
3. Matrices
4. Unordered and Unindexed Sets
5. Lists and Dictionaries
6. String Manipulations

4. Elevator Saga:

Yet another Full-stack game, made by Magnus Wolffelt and contributors in which user needs to transport people to their desired location within a deadline.

In this game, the player needs to use JavaScript to manage the lift movement and make changes accordingly to transport all the people to their respective locations. Average waiting time and maximum waiting time will be shown at the top right of the game to analyze where your logic is being stuck. This fun game helps you concrete your basics in JavaScript and helps you in making a responsive web applications.

These are some of the games which can enhance the experience of students who are learning to code efficiently. Having said that, there are some honorable mentions which are also useful for the students to engage in the fun learning process. Here are the list below:

1. Robo Code
2. Code Combat
3. Vim Adventure
4. Erase all Kittens.
5. Scratch
6. Light Bot
7. Untrusted
8. Code Wars