5.1 Activity: Ups & Downs Game

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You have reached the final activity which will hopefully put all that you have learned in the past twelve sections in perspective. Of course, we hope you'll have some fun as well. This activity is a game modelled after the popular board game "chutes and ladders." In it, you follow your character through a career in computer science - passing through five stages of life.

The game is played in this fashion: Each player (there can be up to four players), rolls the dice and moves forward. Two things can then happen: the player can pick up a new ethics event, or the player can experience an ethical event and possibly move forward or backwards a great deal! The winner is the one who reaches the end first, but the game does not stop until all players have finished.

Players may be either computer or human, but all human players must share the same keyboard and take turns. If you have a user name, you cannot mark this site as done until you have finished a complete game.

Instructions

The opening screen repeats what is said here. Once you click to begin, you choose the number of players who will take part in the game, and specify their attributes, including their name and whether they are human or computer. Then the game begins. You see your character on the left in the first square (there are 90 squares total). Information about what is happening to your character is displayed around him or her. And he never stops smiling, even if he's losing ;-)

Click the mouse to roll the dice and move forward. If you land on a regular square (without green arrows), you pick up an ethics event, which is added to your storage (you can carry six events at most). If you land on a "link" square with green arrows, you must roll the dice again to see which event happens to you. If the event is a good one, you move up along the "ladder," gaining lots of ground. If it is bad, however, you go down the "chute!" There is also a small possibility that nothing will happen...but don't count on it!

Enjoy the activity, and please give the applet some time to load.

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Last revised: 7/23/99