Learning to Program Playfully with 'Human Resource Machine'

With the computer game Human Resource Machine, you can learn the basics of low-level programming in a playful way.

An office worker is given a task by his boss on how to process numbers and letters from the input conveyor belt and what outputs are expected on the output conveyor belt. The player’s task is to “program” the office worker. For this, the office worker has a small auxiliary memory and rudimentary commands such as “copyfrom”, “copyto”, “add”, or incrementing with “bump” at their disposal.

In total, there are 41 such “programming tasks,” ranging from very simple to sorting and determining prime factors. Optional is the optimization based on the number of lines of code or the number of calculation steps performed.

From a technical perspective, this is how you learn the basics of assembly programming. Personally, I found myself transported back to the 80s, when I programmed in Assembly.

The animations are cute, the graphics have a good style, and the music is great. Only the debugging could be a little better, as you cannot set breakpoints, for example.

In the end, however, it is a very great game.