How to play

Everything the game asks of you, on one page. Read it before you sit down with a child, or keep it open beside you while you both work a garden out.

The job

A ball is somewhere in the garden. The puppy will fetch it, but only if you tell it exactly how to get there.

You build a plan, one step at a time. Then you press Run, and the puppy follows the plan exactly. If the plan does not work, you change it and run it again.

The six words the puppy knows

That is the whole language. There is nothing else to learn.

A garden only offers the words it needs. The early ones have nothing but arrows.

Three ways to build a plan

The game changes how you write, one stage at a time. The rules never change. Only the way you enter a step does.

Gardens 1 to 12, tap the arrows

Press an arrow button and the step joins the plan. Tap a step in the plan to take it out again. Hold a step and drag it to move it.

The first gardens need no reading at all. The pictures carry the meaning.

Gardens 13 to 15, press the words

The same steps, now shown as words rather than arrows. You press the words instead of typing them. This is the bridge between the pictures and real writing.

Gardens 16 to 27, write it yourself

Now you type the plan on a keyboard built into the game. One step to a line.

Typing is forgiving on purpose. Any beginning of a word counts, as long as only one word starts that way.

• r is already right.
• dr is already drop.
• d on its own waits, because it could still become down or drop.

A line the puppy does not understand yet is not an error. It is left alone on the screen as something you are part way through writing.

Doing steps again, with a repeat

Later gardens let a group of steps happen again and again. The line that starts a repeat looks like this:

do 3 times

What belongs to the repeat is set in further than that line. The first line that comes back out again ends it. When you type, the game sets the lines in for you, so nobody has to count spaces.

up
do 4 times
  right
down

That plan walks up once, then right four times, then down once.

A repeat can hold another repeat. The number can be anything from 1 to 9.

When the plan stops

The game never says "wrong". It says what the puppy tried to do and what stopped it. There are only a few things that can stop it.

• It walked into the fence at the edge of the garden.
• It walked into a plant, or something else in the way.
• It tried to pick something up, and there was nothing there.
• It tried to pick something up while its mouth was already full.
• The plan ran out before the puppy reached the ball.

Change one step and press Run again. There are no timers, no scores, and no way to lose. A child can stay in one garden as long as they like.

The buttons

One more button sits at the bottom of the list of gardens. "Start all the gardens again" puts every garden back to the beginning.

Playing it with a child

The game is landscape only, so turn the screen sideways. It is meant to be played side by side, with one screen between you.

• Ask what the puppy will do before pressing Run. Predicting is most of the skill.
• When a plan stops, read out what the puppy tried. Let the child find the step to change.
• Let a long answer stand. A plan that works is a correct plan. A shorter one can come later, and is never required.
• Take turns, writing one step each.

An adult who has never programmed can start at garden 1 too. The gardens are a real first course, in the order the ideas build on each other.