Why My Rock Paper Scissors Project Turned Into a Dice Roller

What the lesson actually wanted

Rock Paper Scissors comes up twice in Foundations. First round is just the console, functions and conditionals, using prompt and alert to play. Second round comes after the DOM lesson, and you rebuild it with real buttons and a scoreboard on the page instead of pop ups. Underneath all of it, what the lesson is really checking is whether you can generate a random result, compare it to something, and update what the user sees.

Why I went a different way

I'm not much of a rock paper scissors guy. I do play tabletop games though, and I'm always digging around for a dice roller on my phone that doesn't have ads plastered all over it or fifty options I don't need. By the time I hit the DOM version of the assignment, I already understood the pattern well enough, generate something random, show it, keep track of it. A dice roll is really the same idea as rock paper scissors under the hood. Instead of three choices you've got however many sides the die has.

So I just built the dice roller. It still used everything the lesson was actually testing, random values, DOM updates, click events, keeping state. I just pointed it at something I'd actually use afterward instead of a game I'd close the tab on.

How I think about it now

Odin doesn't hand you step by step instructions for these projects. It gives you a goal and expects you to have picked up the skills from the lessons before it. Nobody grades you extra for straying from the assignment, but nobody's stopping you either, because the game itself was never really the point. It was always about proving you can take a requirement and turn it into working code. That's the same thinking that later turned a plain calculator project into GlovesOn. Figure out what the lesson is actually testing you on, then build something you'll keep using.