Cody & Roby 3D

3D printed Cody & Roby resources and portugese translated kit.

Cody & Roby is an amazingly simple and versatile game developed by italian teachers, available in the official italian Codeweek page. The purpose of this game is to teach basic programming concepts and computational thinking without computers, using play strategies. Players have to guide a character, a robot (hence the Roby nickname) using cards with simple move forward, turn right and turn left commands, while avoiding obstacles in a 5x5 gameboard. This flexible game can be played wiith the entire printed resource kit, or just the cards, some toys and a board. Or, just the students and some chalk on the ground, using children as players and game characters. Codeweek.it suggests two playable games, follow me and duel, but more combinations can be created. All the necessary resources, under a Creative Commons license, can be found in the official Cody & Roby page. They're very simple, yet very well designed and quite elegant. The great design goes beyond the graphical quality. The game resources are language independent, allowing for use without translation, and maybe in pre-literacy contexts. We love them! The project also has a very cool silent video tutorial on this resource. Go to the Cody & Roby page to view it.

We at TIC em 3D (ICT in 3D) discovered this awesome teaching resource during a meeting of the Programação 1CEB, the portuguese coding in schools initiative. We quickly fell in love with this game that combines a cool visual style with a solid learning experience, and decided to bring it into our introduction to coding classes and activities. Since our project is mainly focused in 3D modeling and printing with portuguese students at Agrupamento de Escolas Venda do Pinheiro, we had to give an extra dimension to the Cody & Roby game assets. Using Tinkercad, we designed a 3D printable Roby and obstacle. To preserve details in the printing process, we had to increase the Roby dimensions above the project-recommended 20x20 mm, implying a redesign to the game board. Our version uses 5 cm squares, fitting in A3 paper.

Our 3D Roby. Cute fellow, isn't he?

We're publishing here all our available resources. Use this link for our zip file, containing original Codeweek.it game resources (we saw no need to redesign something that was originally so well designed), our portuguese translation and adaptation (editable in SVG files using Inkscape or any other vector drawing program), and the 3D printable STL files: Cody & Roby (zip). Share and use them as you will.

If you want just the 3D printable files, go here for Cody (STL) and here for the Obstacle (STL). Our resources were printed in a Beethefirst 3D printer, using PLA filament in several colours with medium (0.2 mm) resolution. Print times were two and a half hours for the Roby, using supports, and one hour fifteen minutes for the obstacle, wich does not need support structures. All STL files are error free, corrected using netfabb. Want to reuse, remix, recreate our 3D resources? Here's the link to our Tinkercad project: CodyRoby Game Assets. Copy it freely! We hope you have as much fun tinkering whit it as we had with this coding and 3D printing project.

Thanks to the Codeweek.it for their support! Cody & Roby is an awesome teaching resource, and we're very glad to be able to use it with our young pupils.