Hungry Wolves, Creepy Sheepies: The Gamification of the Programmer’s Classroom

Abstract The Wolves and Sheep game is an educational, multi-agent computer simulation for students of programming classes. Players move about in a two-dimensional landscape, aiming to reach targets or catch other players. Students write programs that control individual players in the game. The programs then participate in a tournament. Students practice basic programming and algorithmic thinking, object-orientation and the role of interfaces, and are even exposed to basic Artificial Intelligence. Gamification helps motivate students and creates positive, but challenging learning experiences. Programming can be a tough skill to learn: those who excel at it have started early. Most have spent countless nights doing detective work to figure out why their pro-gram doesn’t work right. Programming takes a range of abilities beyond robust gen-eral computing skills: learning the syntax of an artificial language, the creative use of algebra, and an intuition when to plan ahead and when to try out ideas in practice. Programmers read and write technical documentation, research tricky questions and relate their work to business requirements. Learning these skills is a frustratin