Continuing its series of doodles related to the coronavirus pandemic, Google on Monday went down memory lane to re-up its 2017 doodle game celebrating 50 years of children coding.
The interactive doodle, which first debuted on the Google homepage on December 4, 2017, is titled 'Coding for Carrots,' and requires you to help a rabbit collect carrots by controlling its motion along a block of tiles, akin to an online version of hopscotch. To control its motion, you need to provide a set of instructions like 'Move forward' or 'Turn right', until the rabbit reaches its destination.
The doodle was put together by three teams: Google Doodle team, Google Blockly team, and researchers from MIT Scratch.
"In the interactive Doodle, you program and help a furry friend across 6 levels in a quest to gather its favorite food by snapping together coding blocks based on the Scratch programming language for kids," says Champika Fernando, a MIT Scratch Team-member who collaborated on the project.
Scratch, a programming language and website , is designed by the MIT Media Lab, and is primarily meant for children aged 8 to 16 years. It was developed as a tool to get children interested in coding outside the constraints of complicated computer languages, and is now used by educators around the world. Scratch allows users to drag and drop blocks of instructions to create interactive animations and games, similar to the one featured in today's doodle.
According to a note from the team, this is the first of the many thowback Doodles that will be featured on the Google homepage in the coming days.
"As COVID-19 continues to impact communities around the world, people and families everywhere are spending more time at home. In light of this, we’re launching a throwback Doodle series looking back at some of our popular interactive Google Doodle games," it said.
