Activities/VisualMatch

About Dimensions

Dimensions (AKA Visual Match) is a pattern-matching game written for Sugar; it is included as part of the Honey collection of Sugar add-ons. The object of the game is to find sets of three cards where each attribute—color, shape, number of elements, and shading—either match on all three cards or are different on all three cards.

Where to get Dimensions

Dimensions is available from the Sugar activity portal: Dimensions Version 36. The source code is available at [1]

Using Dimensions

There is a video of basic game play at [2].

The basics

How to play:

12 cards are on the playing surface at any time.
Click on three cards to make a match.
To get a match, each attribute must be all same or all different
The most recent match is displayed on the left.

More details

Play by clicking on three cards to make a match. As you click, the cards will move to the match area on the left side of the screen. (You can also drag the cards to the match area.) If the cards make a valid match, a smiley face will appear. If they are not a valid match, a frowny face will appear, which details as to why the cards do not match. Clicking on the smiley face will result in the match being removed and new cards dealt from the deck. Clicking on the frowny face will remove the last card in the match area back to the right side of the screen.

Cards have four different attributes: color, shape, fill texture, and number of elements.

The number version works with prime factors instead of shapes and textures.

The word version works with semantic groupings.

A valid match is defined by cards where each attribute is either the same on each card or different on each card, e.g, all three red cards or one red, one green, and one blue card.
An invalid match is when two cards share and attribute and the third card does not, e.g., one red and two green cards.
Matches must be valid across all four attributes. Examples of valid and invalid matches are shown below.
At the end of the game, all of the matches are displayed in a simple animation.
A simple cooperative sharing model is supported.

Everyone works cooperatively to find matches.

Only the initiator of the shared session can start new games, change game type or level.

Also, the game state is saved to the Journal and restored upon resume.

Examples of valid matches

The colors, shapes, and shade match; numbers are different.

The numbers match; colors, shapes and shade are different.

Everything is different.

Examples of invalid matches

two of the same colors (red)

two of the same shape (X)

two of the same shade (solid)

two of the same number (2)

Additional features

Dimensions includes number-search and word-search games in addition to the pattern-search game.
Dimensions includes a computer (robot) assistant. The robot will help you find matches. It operates on a timer—finding matches after an adjustable number of seconds. The robot is enabled/disabled by clicking on the button the the Tool menu.
Dimensions includes Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert Modes. In Beginner Mode, there are only 9 (3²) cards and only two card characteristics. In Intermediate mode, there are 27 (3³) cards and three card characteristics. In Expert Mode, there are 81 (3⁴) cards and four card characteristics.
There is an edit mode so that customized word lists can be used in the Word Game (and shared over the network).
Also, you can load custom cards from the Journal.
The grid layout is arbitrary; there is no need to pick in rows or columns, or one from each column.
The blank cards on the left are a place to display the most recent match; they can be otherwise ignored.
A count of number of matches found is shown in the toolbar; when the robot assistant is helping, the count is displayed as two numbers, where the number of matches found by the robot is in parentheses, e.g., 3(2) would indicate that the robot found 2 matches out of a total of 5 (3+2) found so far.
Dimensions keeps track of your best times (one for Beginner Mode and one for Expert Mode). These times are displayed next to the level-mode buttons on the Tools Toolbar.
You can select cards using the keyboard:

Top row	1, 2, 3
Second row	q, w, e
Third row	a, s, d
Fourth row	z, x, c
Extra (bottom) row	8, 9, 0

Watch out, because Dimensions can be very addictive.

Other modes of play

Number Game

Everything is different: colors, prime factors, and representations.

Word Game

The words are from different semantic groups; the colors are different; the font style (bold) matches.

When there is no match

On occasion, there is no match among the 12 cards on the grid. If there is no match, three additional cards are dealt along the bottom row as illustrated in the figure above.

The toolbars

From left to right:

(a) The standard Sugar 'Activity' Button used to access the Activity Menu, which includes sharing;

(b) The 'New Game' Button used to access the New Game Menu;

(c) The 'Tools' Button used to access the Tools Menu, which includes a computer assistant and game-level variants;

(d) The 'Numbers' Button used to access the Numbers Menu, which includes a variety of Number Game options;

(e) The number of cards remaining in the deck is displayed;

(f) The number of matches found is displayed;

(g) The number of seconds that have elapsed since the last match was found is displayed;

(h) The current status is displayed; Once all of the matches have been found, the total elapsed time is displayed. Note that there may be some cards left on the playing field at the end of the game that do not make a match.

(i) The 'stop' button is used to exit the activity.

From left to right:

(a) New 'Pattern' Game;

(b) New 'Number' Game;

(c) New 'Word' Game;

(d) New 'Custom' Game;

(e) The robot button is used to turn on/off computer assistance;

(f) The time (in seconds) before computer assistance starts;

(g) The level button switches between 'Beginner' (circle) and 'Expert' (diamond) Modes;

Best times for each level are displayed next to the button.

From left to right:

(a) The 'Activity Name' field;

(b) The 'Share' Button used for sharing the activity for collaborative play;

(c) The 'Keep' Button used for saving a snapshot of the current state of the Activity to the Journal.

From left to right:

(a) The edit-word-list button invokes a panel in which to edit the words used in the 'Word' game;

(b) Load custom cards from Journal.

From left to right:

(a) 'Products' Cards;

(b) 'Roman-Numeral' Cards;

(c) 'Number-Word' Cards;

(d) 'Chinese-Number' Cards;

Not shown: 'Mayan' Cards;

(e) 'Hash-Mark' Cards;

(f) 'Dots-in-Circles' Cards;

(g) 'Points-on-a-Star' Cards;

(h) 'Dice' Cards;

(i) 'Dots-in-Rows' Cards.

The game is then created from digits, one of (a) to (d) and one of (e) to (i)

Note: In older versions of Sugar, the toolbars appear above tabs.

From left to right:

(a) 'Activity' Tab (Sharing, Stop, etc.);

(b) 'Game' Tab (New-Game Buttons);

(c) 'Tools' Tab (Robot, Play Levels);

(d) 'Numbers' Tab (Number Game variants).

Gallery

Prime factors (1,2,3,5,7 and 11) are used to determine matches
Roman numerals and dots in a circle
Hashes and products
semantic word groups (animal, food, celestial objects) are used to determine matches
intermediate mode (color, number, and shape)
expert mode mode (color, number, shape, and fill)
the source code
Mayan
Editing the word list
Loading custom cards from the Journal
Custom cards loaded from the Journal
Playing with cards loaded from the Journal

Learning with Dimensions

Extending Dimensions

Creating a custom game

You can create your own set of cards for Dimensions. Use your favorite program for creating images (Paint, Turtle Art, Record, etc.) to make sets of cards. You need to create at least 9 cards in order to play at the beginner level (3 cards each along 2 dimensions). You can also make a collection of 27 cards (3 cards each along 3 dimensions) or 81 cards (3 cards each along 4 dimensions). The cards must all have the same name in the journal with the exception of a number, beginning with 1 and incrementing by 1, e.g., card.1.png, card.2.png, ... card.9.png. Any image format supported by Sugar should work and you do not have to include the image-type suffix in the title, e.g., card.1, card.2, ... card.9 will also work. Just be sure that the order corresponds to the serialization of your multidimensional space, e.g.:

card name	dimension 1	dimension2
my-card.1	one	red
my-card.2	two	red
my-card.3	three	red
my-card.4	one	green
my-card.5	two	green
my-card.6	three	green
my-card.7	one	blue
my-card.8	two	blue
my-card.9	three	blue

You load a set of custom cards from the Journal by clicking on the 'import image' icon and selecting any one image of your set. The rest will be loaded automatically.

The above cards were generated in Turtle Art. The sample code is supplied with Turtle Art: set.ta, the code generates a deck of cards and saves them as SVG to the Journal.

Modifying Dimensions

Show me the code

You can explore the Dimensions source code [cloning the project] directly from git.

Where to report problems

There are several known problems with the current version of Dimensions:

Restore from Journal does not work on pre-0.82 versions of Sugar.
Chinese Cards don't display properly on some systems due to a missing font.
There is no indication of whom found the match in group play.

Reporting problems

If you discover a bug in the program or have a suggestion for an enhancement, please file a ticket in our bug-tracking system.

You can view the open tickets here.

Credits

Dimensions was written by Walter Bender and the students from his 2008-2009 freshman seminar at MIT: Games, Puzzles, and Other Things to Think With.