In 1981, this guy Richard E. Pattis came up with this programming language called Karel the Robot, which was used to teach basic computer programming techniques to his first year computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University. Using the Karel language, which is based on prolog, you could control a little robot moving around in a little world and have it perform basic tasks. There are walls which you try not to bump into and there are "beepers" which you can pick up and move around. And that's pretty much it.
In 2001, a group of high school students started working on a "pythonic" version of the Karel programming language so that it could be taught as a precursor to python for first year computer science students in high school. Thus was born Guido van Robot, a desktop linux program which was actually used in classrooms for a few years.
Today, Arthrobots is a reincarnation of Guido van Robot, built as a self guided instructional tutorial that lives on the web. By following the missions laid out in the Beginner track, students will learn some of the most fundamental concepts in computer science. Specifically:
- functional abstraction
- conditional branching
- and looping
Using these basic building blocks, students can make the robot perform fairly complex tasks, such as finding its way through a maze.
Arthrobots is an open source project developed by Paul Carduner. Contributions to the project are greatly welcome. Check out the issue tracker to find out where help is needed. To get help, make suggestions, or stay up to date on the development of Arthrobots, join the facebook group.