The Amazing Sack Race is an educational activity designed by the SimCalc Project circa 2003 and described in this paper. I recreated the activity with Claude Code and you can play it here!
The goal in the activity is to create a race between two animated characters. The race should have an exciting finish. For example: I started out running fast, but dropped my water bottle. I went back to pick it up and then started running forward again. I wanted to win so I ran as fast I could and the race ended in a tie.
One character always runs at a fixed speed. You can adjust the other character’s graph with the black square handles either on the graph or on the horizontal axis. Push the play button to run your race.
The educational point of this game was for students to learn how the slope of a graph relates to the everyday words they use to express speed and direction.