Learning Java Through Violence

Posted by michael on Sunday September 9, 2001 @03:20AM from the is-there-any-other-way dept.

Joe writes: "Someone introduced me to a new game called Robocode and now I'm hooked as well as my 17 year old son. We are both learning Java while playing the game or I should say while building our Java robots. The game is setup to teach you how to handle events, how to create inner classes, and other Java techniques to build more sophisticated Java bots. I have a c++ background so I've been helping my son with his bots, but he's catching on very fast. It's turning out to be a cool and easy way to get the kid clued into programming and best of all its free." I'll bet if the little Logo turtles shot at each other, I would have had more fun programming as a kid.

3 of 225 comments (clear)

Yes, there are others by interiot · 2001-09-09 03:36 · Score: 5, Informative

Yes, robocode is not the first, see DMOZ's entry. Corewars was perhaps the most famous. Okay, now we can move on to talking about Robocode's merits instead of talking about its family tree.
interview with the developer by n3m6 · 2001-09-09 04:18 · Score: 5, Informative

kuro5hin has a much more in depth look at robowars .
MindRover by OverCode@work · 2001-09-09 05:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

http://www.cognitoy.com

And, of course, Loki ported it to Linux.

It's an incredibly addictive robot battle game. You generally build robots with a GUI interface, but for serious hackers there is an object oriented definition language called Ice that compiles into the same VM code as the GUI builder.

-John