Whack A Mole Project

I’ve done variations in Whack A Mole over the years. I did a Whack Something Game for Windows Phone 7 some years ago for example. But somehow I put it aside and didn’t think about it when I was teaching the last year and a half. This week as the National CS Principles Summit this project came up in one of the presentations. This struck me as a particularly good idea for me to bring back into my own practice. So obviously I started coding. I came up with this.

What I have decided I want to do is use this for is to teach objects and classes. I created a MoleHole class. I may have to revisit that name before I go to students though. Suggestions are welcome. The reason for creating a class is that I could allow the class itself to handle showing and hiding the moles. My hope is that students will understand that having the object take care of itself will make things much easier.
The first think I did was to create  (using Paint) a couple of images – one to show a “mole” and the other an empty “hole.”
Nothing fancy and I may ask students to create their own. So many of them are much more artistic than I am. Doubtless one of them will use a picture of me if history is any indication.
Then I created a new User Control. I’m using Visual Studio and C# for this sample by the way. Once created I added the images to the project as resources and loaded the empty hole image as the initial image for the object background.
I have very little code in  the class. The constructor just sets the initial value of the Tag property which I could have avoided by putting that in the properties when I added the initial background image. The one method I wrote changes the background image and Tag value.

        public void Swap()
        {
            if ((string)Tag == "Empty")
            {
                BackgroundImage = global::WhackAMole.Properties.Resources.Mole;
                Tag = "Full";
            }
            else
            {
                BackgroundImage = global::WhackAMole.Properties.Resources.NoMole;
                Tag = "Empty";
            }
        }

Very simple. I add the objects to the form dynamically and included in that is setting the event handler for the click event. The code for the event handler checks to see if there is a mole showing and if there is it increments the score and swaps out the image by asking the object to do it.

        private void Whack(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            MoleHole hit = (MoleHole)sender;
            if ((string)hit.Tag == "Full")
            {
                hit.Swap();
                score++;
                ScoreLabel.Text = score.ToString();
            }
        }

The mole appears or disappears based on a timer firing. It randomly picks a mole hole object and switches its image and tag, again, by asking the object to do it.

        private void timer1_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            MH[r.Next(MH.Length)].Swap();
        }

Overall, including dynamically creating and loading the mole holes there are something around 30 lines of code. I think I can get students to manage this. And then I’ll want them to make it better, fancier, more interesting. We’ll see how it goes.