Projects on the Move

Perhaps you've heard of Python creator Guido van Rossum, but you might not be familiar with Karel the Robot. Almost 30 years ago, Richard Pattis invented a robot called Karel and presented him to the general public in his 1981 book Karel the Robot: A Gentle Introduction for the Art of Programming [1]. This virtual character has the advantage of living in a simple world in which his biggest challenges are maneuvering around obstacles – namely, walls – and picking up beepers. To tackle his tasks, Karel can be programmed in a simple language with an understandable instruction set and without variables.

The original Karel the Robot programming language was based on Pascal, but many variants have been invented since then to give learners a simpler approach to other programming languages. One of these variants is Guido van Robot, a character in the long-standing tradition of simulated, programmable robots, whose task it is to introduce newcomers to Python [2] (Figure 1). As a tribute to Python's Dutch inventor, Guido van Rossum [3], the students who programmed the Python teaching language in 2001 called it Guido van Robot [4]. Version 3.3 is now available.

Guido – the robot that is, not the Python inventor – can understand five commands: move, turnleft, pickbeeper, putbeeper, and turnoff. The first two commands tell the robot to move or turn left; pick and put tell it to pick up and drop beepers, and turnoff quits the program (Figure 2).

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