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The computercraft mod for Minecraft adds programmable robots called turtles, which can move around, dig tunnels, build walls and interact with anything in-game.
AdaBots helps to teach children and adults alike the Ada programming language. If your child cannot read yet, I recommend you start him / her on DoBots first.
It is possible to use the small terminal window in-game and the built-in scripting language Lua to write programs, but I wanted to make this easier. This is a standalone program you can run on your computer locally, outside of minecraft, which issues commands to the in-game turtles. This means you can use a real programming environment, with code-completion, a debugger, static-analysis and even mathematical proofs of program correctness using SPARK.
Ada is a very safe, easy to learn language. It was designed from the ground up to be easy
to understand and difficult to make mistakes in. It is case-insensitive, disallows assignment
inside conditional statements, has explicit end if;, end loop; etc. instead of the popular
but confusing } in most programming languages, disallows all implicit type conversions
(which also makes it possible to overload on return type), and even makes multithreading easy with
its simple tasking and rendez-vous idiom. Since you can create tasks and multiple turtles in a single
program, you could explain these concepts intuitively using AdaBots.
In addition, the Ada compiler is an unusually helpful one, saying things like:
lovelace.adb:10:04: warning: variable "Blocks" is never read and never assigned
lovelace.adb:20:30: error: "Dat" is undefined
lovelace.adb:20:30: error: possible misspelling of "Data"
You will need:
- A minecraft or minetest installation
- An Ada development environment
You can use either Minecraft or Minetest to run a commandlistener for AdaBots programs.
I recommend using Minecraft for this; either connect to a server with ComputerCraft already installed, or install Adabots in single-player. Currently, the minetest implementation is early Work-In-Progress; movement, digging and block placement works, but expect bugs. Minetest installation instructions here.
For Ada programming, you will need to install:
- An Ada compiler (run the installer for your platform here)
- An IDE (details here)
- Alire (alr)
Clone the AdaBots_examples repo to have a project up and running quickly. Just open adabots_examples.gpr and src/build_wall.adb in your IDE.
Open a terminal and issue make. It should be around ten minutes the first time, but should only take seconds afterwards.
To start the program, run ./bin/[program_name] in a terminal.
Assuming listen is already running on a minecraft turtle, or turtle:listen() on a minetest turtle, it should start moving.
Now that everything is working, you need something to do. If you are on your own, set yourself some goals:
- build a staircase down (3 blocks tall, so you can follow!), and then
- a cavern of 10 x 10, 3 blocks tall
Or, on the surface, build yourself a house, a tower, or a castle. The sky and bedrock are the limits!
To teach (children) using AdaBots, you need at least a basic understanding of programming (not necessarily with Ada). I recommend the AdaCore Introduction to Ada (html / pdf) as a course syllabus. Next, you need to stay one lesson ahead of your pupils by experimenting yourself first.
There is a collection of example programs here. I recommend you use them as a starting point for using AdaBots.