jonasswiatek/strokes — Issue #33: On levels and future directions of Strokes
Author: timdams
Created: 2011-10-14 09:30:46+00:00
State: open
Labels: Discussion, Feature Idea

Hi guys,

I wanted your ideas on the following.
Currently, there's 2 things happening:

a) we're creating a lot of 'low level' achievements (150+) . With low level I mean stuff that students with max of 2 years programming experience can easily solve.
b) we are starting to think about more advancement achievements

Two things will (probably) happen
1° I can think of 1000 of low-level achievements where we for example simply have lots of generic stuff for each type (just like the ones in the primitive type) etc. I could create them (with pleasure) but that will result in an incredible large base of simple stuff all unlockable from the start.
2° The more advanced ones might not be very interesting for beginning programmers and might thus a bit 'clutter' the "unlockable stuff overview " unless we hardwire lotse of dependencies...which then might get cumbersome and artificial.

With these 2 directions we might need to introduce a form of 'levels': user earn 'points' by unlocking stuff and the higher their level/points, the more new/advanced stuff they can unlock. This way we can keep the achievement tree of a bit relaxed (i.e. we don't need to build in lots of dependencies to lower level stuff ) and we can simply unlock stuff wants they reach a level. (but still keep the achievement tree also ofcourse).
Second, we can distribute the lower level stuff, that is all bit identical , over several 'levels'. For example: level one only unlocks the int stuff of primitive type and only the if stuff; level 2 also the double and if else; level 3 char and while; etc. That way our achievement tree isn't forced to hard and we still give the users more of a sense of progress.