Knobby's World

Knobby, a relative of Karel the Robot, by Richard E. Pattis (John Wiley & Sons, 1981, 1995), lives in a rather flat and simple world. The default situation at the left shows Knobby gettting ready to pick a flag 'F' and climb a mountain. Students can manipulate Knobby directly by using buttons, by defining and running macro instructions, or by writing and running programs. Knobby's World comes with a simple structured programming language as well as environment (edit, run and trace facilities) for debugging programs. They can also modify or create their own initial situation files. In our book, chapter 2 ("Problem solving before programming") winds up with an extensive introduction to Knobby's World, with many exercises. The idea is to get students thinking about the problem solving process as well as provide a gentle introduction to programming, before delving into the details of C++ programming.

Click here or on the screen capture above to download the Knobby's World program (for Windows 95 or 3.1). Caveat: it's a bit less stable under Windows 3.1. Note: Knobby's World has been improved since the book was released. A version 1.1 always has fewer bugs and more features! Check it out by downloading it....

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Send feedback to lead author, glenn.blank@lehigh.edu.

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