Guido van Robot

Guido van Robot is a programming language, an IDE and a tutorial designed as an introduction to the fundamentals of (Python) programming for beginners. It is licensed under the GNU GPL.

The program includes a tutorial, whose latest release is 0.5.

The program uses:
 * A playfield called “world”, that is created or loaded as a list of locations of objects (walls and “beepers”) and the robot location and the direction it faces when a user program starts.
 * A program, written or loaded by the user in a Python-like language that includes 5 instructions, 18 tests, conditional branching, iteration and new instruction definition.

History
It was started in 2001 by Steve Howell as “pyKarel”, a Python implementation of the educational programming language for Pascal by Richard E. Pattis called “Karel the Robot”. A team gathered, and rewritten the GUI in wxPython. Then it was renamed Guido van Robot, after the original program and Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language.

Later GvR was rewritten to use GTK+ and GTK sourceview, and renamed GvRng (Guido van Robot Next Generation).

There is also a special GTK version for the OLPC XO.