Looking for something fun to do on family night? How about a friendly game of c-jump, the programming board game:
This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/09/programming-4-fun.html
This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/09/programming-4-fun.html
Did you ever heard about IBM’s Robocode?
Avalon Hill’s RoboRally (now reprinted by Wizards of the Coast) is also worth noting for teaching abstract programming techniques, although it doesn’t actually teach code. If anything it’s much more palatable than board games that contain actual code in it. _
I grew up playing Rocky’s Boots on my father’s Apple II. I’ve also played MindRover and enjoy it as well. That may explain why I’m a programmer today. 
In my recent journeys, I came across a rather novel way of keeping your programming ‘knife’ sharp. I found a small community on a href="http://www.osix.net"http://www.osix.net/a (Open Source Institute) that provides trivial and non-trivial programming challenges for you to try your wits at.
So in a way it is also programming for fun but it also allows you to see how other people solved the challenges as well so it is by and large a good learning experience.
Just thought i’d share.
My friend and I are planning on programming autonomous robots. Do you have any recommendable sites or books that we should look at?
How about Kid’s Programming Language (KPL)?
http://www.ms-inc.net/kpl.aspx
Looks a lot like Basic, but I think they should have use C syntax, case sensitivity, and curly braces: children should be taught as early as possible that the world is full of pointless suffering!
There’s a new children’s programming language from MIT: it’s called SCRATCH.
http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects/scratch/help/index.html
Looks very cool, highly visual. Much better than the crappy LOGO I got as a kid. 
The game called The Incredible Machine, which nobody has so far mentioned is quite a visual sort of “programming”. Besides, it’s an old one. A 10-year old computer would be best to play it (newer laptops had hickups), but I think it also runs via dosbox. Some 2D games can be quite fun.