ABSTRACT Inspired by the Pac-Man arcade game and Karel the Robot, we developed a
lightweight, graphical “sandbox” called Bot-World for teaching Java with an objects-first,
algorithmsearly approach. BotWorld has successfully been used by more than one thousand
students at the University of Pennsylvania in courses taught by five professors over a three
year period. In this paper we describe a series of BotWorld projects and how we use them in
our CS1 course, interspersed with non-BotWorld projects. We give examples of algorithms …