Karel the Robot

Karel the Robot is a Pascal like programming language created by Prof. Richard Pattis (Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University). However this programming language is not concerned with computing expressions and assigning values to variables. Rather each program has a robot execute a task.

As the title of Pattis' book ( A Gentle Introduction to the Art of Programming ) suggests, this is an excellent language to use to introduce students to their first programming language. In my experience using the language, there were several advantages:

A Small Number of Primitives     This makes the language semantics easy to learn and students are able to write meaningful programs immediately ( and much more interesting than "Hello World!"

A Rich Set of Control Structures     The language contains branching and looping structures in addition to procedural abstraction.

A Challenging Problem Environment     Challenging problems in conjunction with a simple set of primitives allows sophisticated concepts such as problem specification and stepwise refinement to be taught in a concrete and intuitive fashion.

Very Entertaining and Lots of Fun     This point can not be overemphasized. Karel always got each class off to a good start!

A Small Number of Primitives		This makes the language semantics easy to learn and students are able to write meaningful programs immediately ( and much more interesting than "Hello World!"
A Rich Set of Control Structures		The language contains branching and looping structures in addition to procedural abstraction.
A Challenging Problem Environment		Challenging problems in conjunction with a simple set of primitives allows sophisticated concepts such as problem specification and stepwise refinement to be taught in a concrete and intuitive fashion.
Very Entertaining and Lots of Fun		This point can not be overemphasized. Karel always got each class off to a good start!