Tic Tac Toe vs. Computer

Hi Everyone!

I homeschool my kids and our project for this "term" is to make an online version of Tic Tac Toe. The kids have already done all the prep work of getting the logistics of the game (if player one goes here, the next spot is...) and we are ready to start coding with a hard coded AI. First, they want to be able to play against the computer ( a future project would be to be able to connect to play to another opponent over the net, but that will be once the first one is done! .

My problem now is that I don't know what the next step is. I program websites and databases in PHP/MySQL, but only use javascript for form validation.

So my "graphic capacity" on the web is very limited, and I am not sure what would be the best language to use to do this.

Here is our idea, would be very happy for some suggestions on how to realize this:

The kids want it to look something like this :

http://www.ideascometolife.com/tictac/index.html

So they want to be able to click on the "marble" and drag it in the space on the board.

If that is too hard, the other option would be to click on your player color, and click on the space on the board and have it turn that color, they are open to that idea too.

(the reason for this look is they also want to do the game TOC, that is a marble game here, so they would have the "look" down and just have to redo the heuristics).

thanks for any help on how to realize this project!

Christine.

Figure out what technologies you will have to use. The whole marble dragging thing is pure browser side interaction. There's basically three technologies in current use that accomplish this. Flash, Javascript, and Java applets. Flash and Javascript (especially as part of AJAX) are incredibly popular, and Java applets have faded significantly.

So you might decide between Flash and Javascript. Notably though, Javascript is a freely usable language, while Flash is really Adobe's product and they charge for it. You can get a free trial, but, you see where I am going with it. Then again, it is incredibly popular because it can have interactivity that Javascript simply cannot.

And, after picking your chosen technology, the next step would be to get really familiar with it.

You might be looking for something more advanced but check this out:

http://scratch.mit.edu/

(an already done tic tac toe http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/SenatorPenguin/1425 )

It's a drag and drop basic visual game editor. It's what my lecturer is making our class in college use. It'll be pretty good for a simple game like Tic tac toe. Take a look at some of the games in the gallery, some of them are VERY good.

One thing to consider is what you want to acomplish with this project in the way of computer development experience. If your idea is to try and learn all the things that go into creating a video game with all the "bells and whistles", I would recommend you look into creating an applet and use the AWT graphics functions, as well as the mouse event listener functions. Just my personal opinion, but I disagree that Java applets are "fading". There are countless possibilities with Java applets, from the most basic to fully interactive hardware-accellerated 3D video games.
Of course, being new to Java, you will have to overcome a bit of a learning curve and do some research, but I think it could be a great learning experience. You can always post here with any questions about specific problems you run into along the way.