Task Driven Learning

Reeborg's World is designed for Task Driven Learning: students are given tasks that Reeborg has to complete, and they must write programs instructing Reeborg how to do so. Feedback is given automatically to students, without requiring a teacher to be present.

Tasks include having Reeborg move objects, build walls, or go to a particular location. Objects in Reeborg's World are colourful; the places they be must moved to by Reeborg are usually indicated by having a picture of the object in shades of grey.

While most programming tasks will likely be relatively simple and aimed at beginners, such as "Have Reeborg move these objects to some specific location", there is no limit to how complex a given programming task can be. As an example, very advanced students can be given a randomly generated maze with one or more objects to be collected and asked to:

1. use the available methods to obtain a JSON description of the world;
2. transform this into some standard graph representation;
3. use search techniques (breadth-first or depth first) to find the shortest path required to complete the task;
4. accomplish the task following the path found, whose length can then be automatically compared with that of the true shortest path.²

If you have some examples (particularly tasks for Reeborg) that you find useful for your students, I would appreciate if you could share them so as to improve Reeborg's World for everyone.

². I have not created such a similar task; interested teachers are certainly welcome to contribute such advanced programming tasks. ↩