I’ve made educational games for nearly twenty years, games that share most of the properties you list, Vitaliy, as advantages of Bug Hunter. Here are my observations about Bug Hunter:

1. Eye candy does not make games better. Zombies, space ships, etc. are fun to make and pleasing to look at, but they do not make a game fun or playable. (My experience is with high school teens; I may be wrong when it comes to young children.) A good game has a balance of intellectual challenge, chance, and playability. This is the opposite of what most people believe about games. As you develop Bug Hunter, I recommend steering away from the artificial player-versus-bug analogy and just let the player demonstrate mastery.
2. Humans love scores. If I’m playing a game, I want to know whether I beat my previous score, bested my buddy, or even made it into the top ten on the leaderboard. In fact, that may be my primary reason to play. Perhaps that’s coming for Bug Hunter. The one-and-done nature of the game right now seemed lacking.
3. Mining the docs for your game content is a brilliant idea. After I played seven rounds, I felt like the formula isn’t quite right yet. For example, one question had “MapThread” missing and I incorrectly tried “Riffle.” That’s it. I lost. I looked at the MapThread[] docs, but I didn’t feel like I could use it or even identify it next time. Perhaps the game could show what my attempt would output so I could compare it to the correct output. Even better, perhaps the game could allow me to keep trying multiple times, each time showing me what my output would be (and perhaps lowering my score).
4. I do agree that there should be some sort of indication where the missing piece goes in the string, maybe a colored rectangle or some other graphic.

As I look back on what I have written, it seems a little negative. I don't mean it as such. I think the game is a great idea with vast potential. I'm looking forward to the next iteration.

This is great! I'm an adult beginner myself, with no formal training in programming. What I continue to find the most challenging aspect of learning the WL is the syntax. You have to get up to speed with the syntax, and quickly, or much of the docs, and most of the great examples shared here won't be comprehensible. This is also why, as much as I enjoyed working through the exercises in SW's new EIWL textbook, I feel that it still places too much emphasis on covering functions and not enough (and not soon enough) on syntax. I've tried out BugHunter a few times and haven't encountered an example yet that removed the 'sugar'. So I agree that allowing a user to pick different areas or themes for testing (for example, 'quiz me on syntax', 'quiz me on functions related to network analysis' etc.) would be a good choice for an initial enhancement.

Thank you for making this!

Hello @Vitaliy Kaurov

I enjoyed playing your Bug Hunter web app. The code and the thought process behind this application is brilliant. I did not know the Legacy Animations Documentation pages existed. Its a very nice and intuitive way of presenting it to users.

I got a similar idea at Wolfram Summer School 2016 and built a simpler prototype. Link: http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/886715 . Its called Infinite Coding Problems Generator in Wolfram Programming Language. I used templates and loaded a CSV file that contains questions from EIWL book.

Your web app is so much fun and its giving me new ideas for improving my prototype. These educational applications has tremendous potential and spikes the learning curve in students. I like to see your app growing big like http://challenges.wolfram.com.

Thank you

Try my web app here: https://wolfr.am/e0t5Zn50

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