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Aditya Batura

Potato Pirates - Learn programming in 30 minutes through a Potato card game

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Potato Pirates is a strategic tabletop card game perfect for classrooms, family time, and game night with friends. It teaches anyone ages 6 and up, over 10 hours worth of programming concepts in 30 minutes, all without a computer.

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Prashidha Kharel

It is a very fun game and requires quite a bit of thinking as well so play. But once you get started, it is very fun. Your way of thinking in terms of programming paradigm will evolve as you play more games. But in its core it is a legit fun card game that is sure to entertain anyone (more people more fun)!

Pros:

Very fun and interesting way to learn programming. Not to mention, its very much engaging.

Cons:

Can take a bit of thinking to get started, but once you do, its awesome.

Kaylene Wakefield

I love this game. I've played it with a few different groups and everyone has had a really good time and got really into it.

Pros:

A round is quite quick (after the first time), easy for everyone to learn and the tactics and play book is really well thought through

Cons:

First round takes awhile while everyone figures out the rules

ᒪᓿSᗅ ᗫᓎᑗᖶᕼᓿᖶ

For newbies, it might take a little time to get used to the game play, but weell worth it.

Pros:

Giggly Fun from the get go! Learning without knowing you are coding!

Cons:

Play a round to get to know the rules, they can take some getting used to!

Micha Yehudi

I backed this on kickstarter because the idea seemed both genius and adorable. I was not disappointed! I'd love to see an expansion in the future. I also loved that there was crowd-translating into many languages! Proud to have contributed to the Hebrew translation :)

Pros:

Quick, relatively easy to understand, opens your mind to different thinking patterns.

Cons:

The potatoes are too cute! If playing too slowly, game can feel a but boring.

J.D. DeVaughn-Brown

I'm a computer science teacher at K-12 school and was extremely excited to get a game that used physical components away from a computer to teach programming concepts. I think it can help students focus on the concepts away from the distractions of the internet.

The major challenge with this game is the competition aspect. This makes it so that only a specific group of kids will be engaged enough to tease out the lessons the game is trying to impart. It is very easy to lose, particularly when you're first starting to learn (i.e., the first 30 minutes), and a lot of kids don't handle losing well.

I've had teenage girls who when they started to lose instantly checked out and younger boys who when they started to lose just started sabotaging the game and annoying their friends.

I've also had groups of students who were awesome about it, appropriately silly, and dove into deep strategies (including forming "alliances" with other players) to win the game.

Player elimination, in general, is not a good idea in an educational game IMO and I've found competition games to be tough in a variety of educational settings.

I'm not an "everyone gets a trophy" type of educator but since this game is designed for younger students, I think something that uses collaboration and/or has students competing against themselves would serve a larger group of students.

Just be advised that this game is not optimal for all settings.

Pros:

Engaging

Fun

Gets kids thinking algorithmically

Cons:

Easy to lose early

Only for a specific group of kids

Competition not as good as collaboration

Aditya Batura
Maker
Hey J.D, Those are all very valid comments. In our experience we too have witness some young kids crying after being eliminated from the game. To combat that, we introduce the more complex (and devastating) cards like the if-else cards as well as the surprise cards at a later stage. The hijack card card can really burn bridges! My suggestion for a classroom setting is to play the first game with only the for loops (you can even remove the "for 3" card as its quite powerful), while loops, action cards and the potato king card. This staggers the learning and also evens out the playing field for the players who take longer to grasp the game (like the teenage girls in your class). We've piloted a study with National Institute of Education in Singapore to determine the effectiveness of using Potato Pirates in a computer science classroom and this is the strategy we've adopted across primary (elementary) and secondary (middle) schools. Hope this helps and improves your experience with Potato Pirates! Full speed ahead! Aditya Batura Co-creator of Potato Pirates
Jennifer Thorson

I've played this game with my kids and with my students. The silliness of potato pirates roasting other potato pirates masks the serious logical learning that happens in the game. Hail Potato King!

Pros:

Fun family game play, educational, silly, POTATOES!

Cons:

It takes several rounds to learn the basics.

Aditya Batura
Maker
Dear all, our new game Potato Pirates: Enter The Spudnet, a board game on cybersecurity and networking, is now live on Kickstarter! Check out our campaign page here: https://www.kickstarter.com/proj... Do head over to our new game's Product Hunt page to support and upvote :) https://www.producthunt.com/post... We really do appreciate your love and support and strive to bridge the gap between the rapidly changing technological concepts and slow-to-adapt educational curriculum as well as breaking the barriers between the layperson and seemingly complicated computer science concepts.
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