Traffic Manager

Game Concept: an Overview

Traffic Manager is a game right at the intersection of life and algorithms.

Players of two will compete on who will make the best traffic light algorithm and minimize traffic congestion. Learn Algorithms in practice and enjoy the competition with your friends!

Need for the game

The computer classes in K-12 often fail to convey a larger realization of how computational thinking can be used to create experiences and to solve problems in the real world. Where we know that computing potential range from automating simple repetitive tasks to running large scale systems and services. Inspiration about the potential of computing to create experiences and to solve problems in the world is a fundamental need in early computer education.

“Teachers know how to put the computing knowledge together to solve problems, but they don’t know what problems they can solve.”

• Dr. Saquib Razak, Project Investigator of Alice in the Middle East, an initiative to introduce computing in K-12 in Qatar. He has been training teachers for more than three years.

The following chart represents verify that most schools don't teach computer programming, a very basic skill in computing.

Resource: Code.org. Although this statistic is tailored for the US, Qatar has a smaller set of schools who teach programming.

Serious Goals of the game are:

• inspire and inform players about some of the ways where Algorithms can be used in solving problems in the real world,
• how algorithms are executed,
• what are the factors to consider when making up an algorithm

Target Audience

Secondary school computer teachers in Qatar with ICT (Information and Computer Technology) background who will be trained to teach computational thinking. Teachers in Qatar inevitably face traffic congestion peak time caused by simultaneous trips in and out of schools around the country. Where it is worth mentioning that traffic jam is so serious that it recently caused significant rise in the overall economic cost, estimated by 0.6 billion Qatari Riyals.

Overview of the Gameplay

Players randomly gets a set of cars on two sides of the intersection and take turns determining the lights algorithm. But be careful, there is a limited number of cars that can move at each point of time. While there Players keep getting scores on each turn, the game average out the final score to determine the winner!