Do Robots Dream of Virtual Sheep: Rediscovering the "Karel the Robot " Paradigm for the "Plug&Play Generation"

Figure 1: ”The Meadow ” virtual environment. We introduce ”C-Sheep”, an educational system designed to teach students the fundamentals of computer programming in a novel and exciting way. Recent studies suggest that computer science educa-tion is fast approaching a crisis- application numbers for degree courses in the area of computer programming are down, and poten-tial candidates are put off the subject which they do not fully under-stand. We address this problem with our system by providing the visually rich virtual environment of ”The Meadow”, where the user writes programs to control the behaviour of a sheep using our ”C-Sheep ” programming language. This combination of the ”Karel the Robot ” paradigm with modern 3D computer graphics techniques, more commonly found in computer games, aims to help students to realise that computer programming can be an enjoyable and re-warding experience and intends to help educators with the teaching of computer science fundamentals. Our mini-language-like system for computer science education uses a state of the art rendering en-gine offering features more commonly found in entertainment sys-tems. The scope of the mini-language is designed to fit in with the curriculum for the first term of an introductory computer program