Kids Learn to Code with AdaBots

We present an open source software stack that creates a teaching environment especially well suited to teaching children the Ada programming language. AdaBots are programmable bots in a 3 dimensional voxel world, similar to Minecraft. These are built as a mod for minetest, and listen via a proxy server to an Ada program. This program is a normal Ada executable built with the adabots library, available through Alire, and controls one or more AdaBots with instructions such as dig, turnᵣight, placedown with which it can move about and modify the world in minetest. We posit that it is best to learn in a realistic environment, using the same tools real programmers use in the field, so that minimal effort is required later to transition from the learning environment to the real world.