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, turn_right, place_down 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.