The Strokes project is still ongoing and several interesting new features have been added by my Danish friends! For those unfamiliar with this project (have you never read this blog???) , simply put: Strokes a Visual Studio 2010 extension that allows users to gain achievements while programming. It is mainly targeted to students who are learning C#; however some interest from the development community, especially VB.NET devs, also exists. Read this post for a full overview of the project.
The new features that have been added since my last post, in no particular order, are:
- Achievement tree: It is now possible to define what achievement needs to be unlocked before the user can unlock a particular other achievement. For example, the user can’t unlock the “Create a foreach loop”, if he never ever unlocked the “create a for loop”. This allows us to prevent students from accidently unlocking things they never heard of before.
- Localization: If anyone ever feels like using the Strokes extension in a particular language/culture, this can now simply be done as the achievement titles and descriptions can now be localized (currently supported languages are : English 100%, Danish 5%, Dutch 5%, Russian 0,01% )
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More than 150 achievements and counting: Currently there are more than 150 achievements defined that the user can unlock. These are categorized in 13 categories. Yours truly is especially having fun in writing achievements in the Funny category (though your definition of what is in fact funny might differ a bit), especially the “What if Visual Studio had Achievements” post was a great inspiration.
If you wish to contribute in any which way, don’t hesitate to contact us on our github page. Suppose you wish to write achievements, make fancy art, translate stuff, etc. join us and let eternal glory be yours!
Tim Dams 
Really awesome idea! Never heard of this. But had to grin when I read you post.
Thumbs up for the good work!
We have a student each 2-3 month here in our office.
Trying to teach them basic stuff of object orientated programming in C# and Visual Studio.
If it goes well, we are going deeper the rabbit hole.
It depends on the students skill 🙂
I will try your extension with the next student.
Is it possible to define a more complex challenge that got kind of hierarchical achievements?
Like building an advanced program step for step.
Greetings
Robin
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Really cool idea! It will be easier to learn on our school. People who do gaming will love it and learn faster because of this.
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Isn’t it the same as: http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio ?
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Well , the original idea actually came from (http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-had-achievements/) , as you can read in my earlier post(https://timdams.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/world-of-c-craft-an-achievement-based-classroom-2/) , the guys from Microsoft mention there that they had the same idea…
But fair is fair, the MS solution arrived several weeks after ours 🙂
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