RoboMind is a simple educational programming environment with an own scripting language that allows beginners to learn the basics of computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 by programming a simulated robot

Robot

A robot is a mechanical or virtual intelligent agent that can perform tasks automatically or with guidance, typically by remote control. In practice a robot is usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by computer and electronic programming. Robots can be autonomous, semi-autonomous or...

. In addition to introducing common programming techniques, it also aims at offering insights in robotics

Robotics

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

 and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

.
RoboMind is available as stand-alone application for Windows, Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 and Mac OSX. It is free and open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 under its own RoboMind license. It was first released in 2005 and was originally developed by Arvid Halma, a student of the University of Amsterdam at that time.

The simulation environment

The application is build around a two-dimensional grid world in which a robot can move around, observe neighboring cells, or mark them by leaving a paint trail. The world may also contain so-called beacons that can be carried around by the robot in order to clear its way.

The scripting language

RoboMind offers a basic scripting language that consists of a concise set of rules. Apart from commands to make the robot perform basic movement instructions, the control flow

Control flow

In computer science, control flow refers to the order in which the individual statements, instructions, or function calls of an imperative or a declarative program are executed or evaluated....

 can be modified by conditional branching

Branch (computer science)

A branch is sequence of code in a computer program which is conditionally executed depending on whether the flow of control is altered or not . The term can be used when referring to programs in high level languages as well as program written in machine code or assembly language...

 (if-then-else), loops (while) and calls to custom procedures.

Example script to draw square:
paintWhite
repeat(4) {
forward(2)
right
}

Recursive line follower example:
follow

procedure follow{
if(frontIsWhite){
forward(1)
}
else if(rightIsWhite){
right
}
else if(leftIsWhite){
left
}
else{
end
}
follow
}

The language does not allow declaring variables (other than binding procedure/function arguments). Rather modifications to the environment, such as painting grid cells, are used to store a runtime state. This shows the robot in its environment is directly related to 2D Turing machine

Turing machine

A Turing machine is a theoretical device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside a...

s.
The scripting language itself is currently available in 14 languages: Arabic, Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

, Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

, English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

, Polish

Polish language

Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...

, Brazilian Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese is a group of Portuguese dialects written and spoken by most of the 190 million inhabitants of Brazil and by a few million Brazilian emigrants, mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Canada, Japan and Paraguay....

, Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

, Turkish

Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

 and Ukrainian

Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....

. All instructions and keywords can be translated. This makes it easier to learn for non-English speakers than most other programming languages that are constrained to English syntax and Latin alphabets.

Relation to other educational software

RoboMind can be related to the Logo programming language

Logo (programming language)

Logo is a multi-paradigm computer programming language used in education. It is an adaptation and dialect of the Lisp language; some have called it Lisp without the parentheses. It was originally conceived and written as functional programming language, and drove a mechanical turtle as an output...

, at which a turtle can be moved around to create geometric shapes. The syntax of RoboMind however is different and corresponds more directly to main stream scripting languages, such as JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....

. In RoboMind perceiving and changing the environment are of equal importance, where Logo focuses mostly on the latter. This makes RoboMind more suitable to demonstrate real life applications. In Logo, on the other hand, users have more freedom to create visual effects.

Other free educational programming languages, such as Alice

Alice (software)

Alice is a freeware object-oriented educational programming language with an integrated development environment . Later versions are implemented in Java. Alice uses a drag and drop environment to create computer animations using 3D models...

 and Scratch focus on the wider domain of interactive story telling.

See also

• Educational programming language
  Educational programming language
  An educational programming language is a programming language that is designed primarily as a learning instrument and not so much as a tool for writing programs for real-world work.-Learning paths:...
  
  
• Logo programming language
• Alice (software)
  Alice (software)
  Alice is a freeware object-oriented educational programming language with an integrated development environment . Later versions are implemented in Java. Alice uses a drag and drop environment to create computer animations using 3D models...
  
  
• Scratch (programming language)