MIKI

A Matlab implementation of 'Niki the Robot' (a.k.a. Karel).

MIKI is a Matlab implementation of Niki the Robot' (a.k.a. Karel), a simple educational environment for teaching students basic principles of programming.

Niki is a small robot living in a rectangular world through which he travels using the functions 'move' and 'turn_left' or 'turn_right'. Walls can block his way which can be detected using the functions 'front_clear', 'left_clear' or 'right_clear'. Moreover, Niki has a supply of disks which he can drop to the field ('drop') and pick up again ('pick_up'). To test if he is positioned over a disk, he can use the 'over_disk' function.

Using this small set of instruction the user can let Niki solve various assignments ranging form very easy ('move to the next wall') to hard ('traverse the maze and find the hidden treasure'). Along the way, he learns basic algorithmic concepts like branching, loops, or even recursion.