Robot simulator facilitating the education of concurrent programming

The paper presents an experiment of teaching Java-based concurrency using a robot simulator. The computer programming education is a challenging task, especially when non-computer science students are taught complex programming concepts. Recently, great deals of simplified programming languages, environments and simulating software have been proposed to support teaching and self-learning different programming techniques. But still, there is no solution facilitating effective teaching in the domain of concurrent programming in the Java language. In this paper we present our original concept of exercises using a robot simulator to teach Java-based concurrency. The simulator seems to be a good solution facilitating the education of concurrent programming, as actions performed in real-time by the simulator allow students to quickly identify their mistakes.