Karel

1
Karel

• Karel is an educational programming language for
  beginners, created by Richard E. Pattis
  (currently at Pace University, NY).
• Pattis used the language in his courses at
  Stanford University, California.
• The language is named after Karel Capek, a Czech
  writer who introduced the word robot.

2
Karel

• Karel the Robot was first introduced over 25
  years ago as a vehicle for introducing students
  to programming, at a time when the dominant
  language for teaching programming was Pascal.
• It was revised as Karel (for C)
• The current version - called Karel J. Robot - is
  programmed using Java, and runs using a robot
  simulator, also written in Java.

3
Karel

• A program in Karel is used to control a simple
  robot named Karel that lives in an environment
  consisting of a grid of streets (left-right) and
  avenues (up-down).
• Karel understands five basic instructions
• move (Karel moves by one square in the direction
  he is facing),
• turnLeft (Karel turns 90  left),
• putBeeper (Karel puts a beeper on the square he
  is standing at),
• pickBeeper (Karel lifts a beeper off the square
  he is standing at), and
• turnOff (Karel switches himself off, the program
  ends).

4
Karel

• Karel can also perform boolean queries about his
  immediate environment, asking whether there is a
  beeper where he is standing, whether there are
  barriers next to him, and about the direction he
  is facing.
• A programmer can create additional instructions
  by defining them in terms of the five basic
  instructions, and by using conditional control
  flow statements if and while with environment
  queries, and by using the iterate construct.

5
Karel is Kool

• Visual Feedback is Powerful students see their
  mistakes/triumphs
• Stay within one common metaphor for a while so
  students can focus on important topics and retain
  some prior knowledge as they move through the
  topics it wont seem so disconnected to them
• Most major concepts covered in short period of
  time
• Inheritance, Polymorphism, Abstraction,
  Encapsulation, OOP-Design, Recursion, Iteration,
  Selection,

6
More reasons Karel is Kool

• Filters out many (relevant) details so one can
  focus on the major concepts
• Not in danger of losing sight of the Forest
  (computer science) through the details of the
  Trees (java details)
• Its pure Java
• Introduce many major topics in a short period of
  time not too much detail
• then, as the year goes on, you will spiral back
  through those topics introducing more and more
  detail as required

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Even more reasons Karel is Kool

• Variety of robot tasks are both plentiful and
  provocative all based on a set of primitives
• Same exact principle in Geometry, Carpentry,
• Up and running with coding in a very short period
  of time students get hands-on, non-trivial
  experience - immediately
• Lots of support http//www.apcomputerscience.com/
  karel/index.htm and others
• FREE!