CodeWorld is an educational web-based programming environment using a variant of Haskell. It includes:
- A set of web-based tools for students to easily create their own computer drawings, animations, and games.
- A simple mathematical model of computer games, inspired by gloss.
- The ability for students to run and use their creations right in a web browser using GHCJS as a compiler.
Google is distributing the code for CodeWorld, but CodeWorld is not an official Google project, and Google provides no support for it.
Just visit https://code.world to get started.
There is no need to download or install anything to use CodeWorld. This repository will be useful if you prefer to fork and modify the CodeWorld environment, or contribute changes.
To discuss and hear announcements about CodeWorld, subscribe to the mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/codeworld-discuss
The mailing list should be used to:
- Hear announcements about and discuss upcoming changes and features.
- Ask questions about using the system, and give feedback about your experiences.
- Share interesting ways of using the site, related classroom activities, and more.
To report bugs or file formal feature requests, try https://github.com/google/codeworld/issues.
There is a slight bit of paperwork involved in contributing to CodeWorld. You'll need to agree to a Contributor License Agreement. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.
Building and running CodeWorld can be a lengthy process, but is automated using the installation scripts in the root directory, which work on most forms of Linux, including Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, and CentOS. The step by step instructions are as follows:
- Read the caveats, explained below.
- Change to the root directory of the project.
- Run
./install.shto install GHC, GHCJS, and required libraries. - Run
./build.shto build CodeWorld itself. - Run
./run.shto start the server.
You can now access the CodeWorld system at http://localhost:8080.
While the installation process installs most of its files inside codeworld/build, it does
clobber ~/.ghc, ~/.ghcjs, and ~/.cabal. I recommend that you run CodeWorld as a
dedicated user account to avoid causing problems for other Haskell installations. If you
don't, note that you will lose your user package database.
See bug #4 for details.
CodeWorld allows users to authenticate using a Google account, and save their projects. For this feature to work, you need to obtain a Google API key, and store it in codeworld-server/web/clientId.txt. If you don't do this, the sign-in and save features will not function correctly, but the rest of the site will be usable.
If you are installing CodeWorld on a virtual server, be aware that the default RAM on these servers is often not sufficient for GHC. CodeWorld needs to compile very large Haskell projects during its installation. The following should be sufficient to resolve any out-of-memory problems you encounter:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1024 count=2097152
$ sudo mkswap /swap
$ sudo swapon /swap
This creates a 2 GB swap file to increase available virtual memory. Installation with a swap file may be slow, but it will succeed. (Unless you intend to write very large programs in CodeWorld, it's usually safe to remove the swap file after running the server for the first time.)