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Learn Ada with programmable bots!

Program Text Demo

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.

Why Ada?

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"

Getting started

You will need:

  • A minecraft or minetest installation
  • An Ada development environment

Minecraft / Minetest install instructions

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.

Ada environment

For Ada programming, you will need to install:

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.

Compile & Run

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.

What to do?

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!

Ada basics

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.

Read the example programs

There is a collection of example programs here. I recommend you use them as a starting point for using AdaBots.

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Learn Ada by programming Minecraft robots!

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