You love your kids. But as much as you want them to enjoy their youth, you’d rather they spend their most precocious days learning the skills that will make them gobs of money some day. You know, like rapping. Or playing NBA ball. Or, if they’re neither skilled on the mic nor athletic, coding software. Those guys make good bank, too. And here’s how you steer them in that direction: the c-Jump Computer Programming Board Game.
Designed for kids 11 and up, it’s a board game about snowboarding down a mountain. On your way down, you learn basic programming structures like conditional statements, loops and variable assignment. Because, you know, that could be fun. Uhhh…
The c-Jump Board Game actually plays like traditional tabletop games of this ilk, complete with four-person play, dice rolling and moving your token from one square to another. Except the whole thing is laid out like a programming flowchart, complete with TRUE and FALSE arrows telling you where to go next. Play time is estimated at around 30 minutes, which means there’s no infinite loop in this thing, which is sad (let’s face it, you’re not really learning programming until your code regularly hangs and your only solution is to reboot).
This Christmas, I imagine some poor kid will receive this and cry. It’s all good, though. Someday, while living their exciting life of sitting in a cubicle writing code, they’ll remember your gift and be eternally grateful. Well, that or they’ll curse your name while making an offering to the Prince of Darkness. The c-Jump Computer Programming Board Game is available now at Thinkgeek, priced at $24.99.