The Soccer-Fun project

Abstract

In the Soccer-Fun, students program the brains of football players in a functional language. Soccer-Fun has been developed for an introductory course in functional programming at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. We have used Soccer-Fun in teaching during the past four years. We have also experience in using Soccer-Fun for pupils in secondary education. Soccer-Fun is stimulating because it is about a well-known problem domain. It engages students to problem solving with functional programming because it allows them to compete at several disciplines: the best performing football team becomes the champion of a tournament; the best written code is awarded with a prize; students are judged on the algorithms used. This enables every student to participate and perform at her favorite skill. Soccer-Fun is implemented in Clean and uses its GUI toolkit Object I/O for rendering. It can be implemented in any functional programming language that supports some kind of windowing toolkit. © Cambridge University Press 2010.