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My engineering students are just now starting with Robocode, and we're running a rumble with student bots and sample bots. Round one will be basic Robots. AdvancedRobots will be later on in the semester. :)

Very cool! How do you address the issue of browsing other people's bots online, or do you? And what level are the students at?

All bots will be open source, and I'll be reading the code of each student's bot to check for plagiarism.

The students are at a complete ground level right now. I'm starting with the absolute basics (turnRight(90) makes your bot turn right 90 degrees.. etc) Then I'm teaching actual Java/programming fundamentals from there.

This all builds to them making their own LEGO/Tetrix robots later in the year, which will be in a C variant. I figure learning basic Java syntax as well as practical programming will serve them well for that.

I'm excited!

On a personal Robocode note, I've been thinking about maybe doing a new bot using the best parts of deBroglie's guts. A full on clean-up job sounds so tiring.. and it'd be nice to have a bot cleanly coded from the start. Maybe even with every method properly documented! Ahhh. Maybe it's a pipe-dream.

I saw a cool way of checking for plagiarism (or at least checking for possible instances before human verification): add both source files to their own individual lzma-compressed (eg using 7zip) files. Check the sizes. Then add them both to the same file to see how much mutual information they hold. Of course, this is easily beaten by adding junk to your source code, but it is useful for comparing texts etc =) It is also easily scriptable.

Nice idea!

The course resources and assignments are on an online learning system called Moodle, which has a source code plagiarism plugin that I'm interested to install and try out.

For the non Advanced bots, I'm just going to read their code to check it out. I have 13 students, so it won't be too time intensive.