Interpreter for Application “Teaching Kids Programming with Gamification”

Today, the field of additional IT education for schoolchildren is developing very actively, especially considering amount of used technologies. One of the most striking areas is the development of specialized applications designed to teach children to program in a playful way. At the same time, despite the abundance of such applications on the market, almost all of them have extremely limited capabilities and do not fully satisfy a number of existing pedagogical needs, such as, for example, the ability of children to work in a team and the development of spatial thinking. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of existing solutions have extremely limited physics and do not have the ability to interpret code in different programming languages, which leads to severe restrictions on the range of problems that can be solved using such applications. As a consequence of the listed shortcomings of the available software, for the further improvement of additional IT education for schoolchildren, a much more flexible and multifunctional application is needed, in contrast to those that exist at the moment. Accordingly, the purpose of this work is to describe a code interpreter for such software, which allows working with various programming languages and is able to calculate physics in a three- dimensional game world for several characters at once. Project is basically and implementation of business logic of the game engine as well as a module for interpreting the student's code. The most important functions of this work are the processing of movements in a three- dimensional world, the ability to process the actions of several players at once, the ability to interpret a subset of the programming language, as well as the ability to process code on the client side of the application. Both parts of the application were implemented in C#. Interpretation of the code was implemented using the ANTLR library.