Google brings back popular Doodle games so you stay home

In a bid to encourage people to stay at home amid the coronavirus outbreak, Google has started a ‘Stay and Play at Home’ doodle series.

Popular Google Doodle games will be brought back through this series. It began with 2017’s hit game Coding which was released to mark the 50th anniversary of Kids Coding.

“As COVID-19 continues to impact communities around the world, people and families everywhere are spending more time at home,” read the description. It added that keeping in view the situation, the “throwback Doodle series” has been launched to look back at some of the most interactive Google Doodle games.

As soon as the Google homepage is opened, a doodle of someone sitting in front of a computer screen is visible.

Clicking on the doodle redirects the user to a page where one can play the interactive game.

While the tech giant has started the series with ‘Coding’, upcoming games from the Google Doodle archive are hidden for now, and will presumably only be available on the day of their re-launch.

Today’s doodle was first launched on 4 December 2017, during the Computer Science Education Week. In the 6-level game of Coding for Carrots, players are required to move a rabbit across tiles to eat their “favourite food” — carrots — by stacking coding blocks one after the other.

This was based on the Scratch programming language. Scratch is a children-specific block-based visual programming language created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The aim was to make computers more accessible and welcoming to kids. It was “designed to be less intimidating than typical programming languages, but just as powerful and expressive”.