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Enjoy your stay!

A first look at using MUPPETS in the classrom, the paper “The use of MUPPETS in an introductory java programming course” was published in the proceedings of the 5th conference on Information Technology Education, which is available through the ACM. In the past students used a package called “Robocode”, which is available from IBM. This project involved programming a virtual robot that could “fight” in an arena according to some agreed upon set of rules, which were developed both as part of the Robocode package and discussed and agreed upon in lecture. While the students enjoyed this project, the proliferation of available code on the Internet for the framework led to this project being removed from the course. We have implemented a variant of “RoboCode” in MUPPETS that addresses the code availability issue and provides a more interesting and graphically rich environment for the students.