{"id":9535,"date":"2016-09-13T18:07:59","date_gmt":"2016-09-13T16:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/informatica.uniurb.it\/triennale\/?p=9535"},"modified":"2016-09-14T12:03:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-14T10:03:00","slug":"treasurehuntbot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/informatica.uniurb.it\/triennale\/treasurehuntbot\/","title":{"rendered":"Implementing a bot-based treasure hunt game"},"content":{"rendered":"

On August 26th, during the course of the \u201cCoding in your Classroom, Now!\u201d summer school, a large treasure hunt game<\/strong> took place in the historical center of Urbino:\u00a026<\/strong> groups, composed of 139<\/strong> participants overall, challenged each other by chasing clues through the narrow and steep streets of the city, following the orders of a\u2026 bot<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The game had been developed during the week just before the event and the whole team behind the treasure hunt\u00a0spent the last minutes before the start feverishly fixing the last bugs. (Well, most of them.)<\/p>\n

The summer school, aimed at school teachers of all grades, had the main focus of bringing coding to the classroom, in a way that could be engaging for both teachers and young students.\u00a0Thus, it made more than sense that the treasure hunt itself, \u201cUrbino Code Hunting<\/a>\u201d as it was called, would be based on coding puzzles as well.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Treasure<\/p>\n

What made the treasure hunt interesting is that the whole registration process, the actual hunting, puzzling, and other game mechanics were directly handled by a Telegram bot<\/a>. Anyone with a Telegram account could very easily register during the 4 days before the game just by entering a conversation with it.<\/p>\n

Registrations to the game were handled by a run of the mill conversation with the bot.<\/h4>\n

The bot asked registrants to solve\u00a0a \u201cpreliminary\u201d puzzle (to prepare players for what would have come later and to work as some kind of captcha<\/em>), how many other participants would have taken part to the game together\u00a0with the team leader, and the team\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

\"Urbino<\/p>\n

Usually a treasure hunt game requires players to find hidden objects or reach secret locations based on some\u2014more or less vague\u2014clues. In our case, the actual puzzling was\u00a0centered around coding questions delivered by the bot, not around recognizing locations from clues, both because coding was\u00a0the theme of the game and because many participants weren’t familiar with the city. Therefore,\u00a0locations to reach were given out explicitly by the bot.<\/p>\n

The actual gameplay<\/strong>\u00a0was\u00a0structured\u00a0as follows:<\/p>\n