Yesterday, I’ve signed off and published Collider.JAM Development Release 9.

The package is available on npm:

npm install -g collider.jam

It’s the 8th Collider.JAM release this year. The changelog is not as big, as in the previous release, but still, there are significant changes.

We finally have CONTRIBUTING.md with tips on how one can help the project. It’s attributed primarily to Hacktoberfest and the best open-source practices I’ve learned along the way.

But this release is not about features, it is about user experience.

The readme and help are significantly improved. The ultimate goal is to have the documentation good enough for on-boarding without any additional help. We still have a long road ahead to get there, but the roadmap is in place. And we’ll continue to experiment with various forms and formats to get the best results possible.

There is a Pong tutorial available in help now. I feel the need for a series of tutorials just like that - Breakout, Tetris, Asteroids, Snake, Missile Attack…

Classic games are built around well-understood mechanics, thus providing ideal tutorial material. You don’t have to figure out how the game works, just discover and use the fitting blocks of Collider.JAM and JavaScript to make it work.

It is a valuable lesson in pedagogy I haven’t defined for myself up to this point. Although, I’ve been using it intuitively for quite a while.

Leverage well-understood mechanics to teach new concepts.

Everybody knows how to play Pac-Man or fit blocks in Tetris. We can use that as a vehicle of discovery. E.g. explain two-dimensional arrays using the Tetris field. The possibilities are limited only by our imagination.

So expect more awesome tutorials on Collider.JAM and JavaScript in the nearest future!