Karel the Robot Learns Java
By admin • Mar 16th, 2009 • Category: Uncategorized
Karel the Robot Learns Java
by: Eric Roberts
Title: Karel The Robot Learns Java
Author: Eric Roberts
Year: 2005
Publisher: Department of Computer Science
Stanford University
September 2005
Description:
Karel the Robot Learns Java—a 35-page tutorial that introduces the major concepts in programming in the context of an extremely simple robot world.
In the 1970s, a Stanford graduate student named Rich Pattis decided that it would be easier to teach the fundamentals of programming if students could somehow learn the basic ideas in a simple environment free from the complexities that characterize most programming languages. Drawing inspiration from the success of Seymour Papert’s LOGO project at MIT, Rich designed an introductory programming environment in which students teach a robot to solve simple problems. That robot was named Karel, after the Czech playwright Karel Capek, whose 1923 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) gave the word robot to the English language.
Karel the Robot was quite a success. Karel was used in introductory computer science courses all across the country, to the point that Rich’s textbook sold well over 100,000 copies. Many generations of CS106A students learned how programming works by putting Karel through its paces. But nothing lasts forever. In the middle of the 1990s, the
simulator we had been using for Karel the Robot stopped working. We were, however, soon able to get a version of Karel up and running in the Thetis interpreter we were using at the time. But then, a year ago, CS106A switched to Java, and Karel again vanished from the scene. For the last three quarters, the hole in the curriculum left by Karel’s
departure has been competently filled by Nick Parlante’s Binky world, but it seems about time to bring Karel back. The new implementation of Karel is designed to be compatible with both Java and the Eclipse programming environment, which means that you’ll get to practice using the Eclipse editor and debugger from the very beginning of the course.
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