Online Educational Game of Snakes and Ladders

-Shalini Pradhan

-Manali Joshi

-Uttara Paingankar

-Seema Joshi

Introduction Computer mediated learning has gained a lot of

popularity in the past decade. Learning is enhanced if this process is coupled with games.

• Interactive multiplayer games act as an excellent learning tool.

• The multi-player games have imposed a requirement on the Internet to support low-latency real-time interactions.

• It is essential that all the users / players get the same view in multi-user online games.

Objectives

• Design of an multiplayer interactive game

• Incorporating learning aspects in the game as a way of interaction

• Make the system distributed over a network

• Achieve a degree of “fairness” in the game

• Scalability

• Interoperability

Related Work• Caching and Replication techniques to handle

network heterogeneity.– The protocols proposed to handle consistency problems

in distributed applications can help in dealing with heterogeneous clients.

• Use of Java technology for simulating real time synchronous collaborative systems like multi-user games.

• Use of replicated architectures for synchronous collaborative multi-user systems since they require low bandwidth and transfer minimal state information.

Related Work (contd.) • Implementation of online games as virtual reality

games where clients can see themselves within the game environment.– Dealing with security, synchronization and fairness

issues in these systems.

• Implementation of a multiple-server model to handle huge loads of data. Issues like monitoring of resources are dealt with.

• Load balancing issues for dynamic change of workload in network games. Load-balancing algorithms have been proposed.

Proposed Solution

System Architecture

Technical Architecture

Technology and Tools

• Programming Language: Java (J Creator)• Common Object Request Broker Architecture

(CORBA): For communication between the application and the server CORBA is used.

• Database: MS Access• JDBC – ODBC for database connectivity• Environment: JDK 1.3• Client side web-interface: Active Server Pages

Why CORBA?

• Interoperability

• Scalability

• Heterogeneity

• CORBA Services

Flow Diagram

No

Yes

User Login

Check if user is registered

Register NewUser

Go to Game Page

User DB

Flow Diagram contd…

Game PageCheck the Number of

usersStart Game

Wait for users

Throw DiceIs the Question

Answered?

Don’t proceedGive control the

next user

Advance appropriatelyBy checking the Snake

And ladder at each position

PositionTable

When 100 is reachedBy one user display“END OF GAME”

User DB

What we learnt ??????

• Software Development Lifecycle• Good Software Designing Skills • Code Modularity • Communication on CORBA • Threads in CORBA – Identification not

available in CORBA 2.3• JAVA AWT• ASP

Future Work

• Extend the game to support more users per game session

• Extend the game to support more game sessions

• Incorporate levels of difficulty in the game• Incorporate this game into a bigger

framework of many other games• Can be enhanced to support a variety of

knowledge databases• Users can assess their performances

(Reports / Graphs)

DEMONSTRATION

ScreenshotsLogin Page

ScreenshotsAuthentication Page

ScreenshotsUser Registration Page

ScreenshotsWelcome Page

ScreenshotsUser Profile Maintenance Page

ScreenshotsError Message Screens

ScreenshotsGame Page

Screenshots