At my alma mater we, the students, used to organize a one week "Introduction To Programming" course based on Robocode. It was meant to teach freshmen the very b

At my alma mater we, the students, used to organize a one week "Introduction To Programming" course based on Robocode. It was meant to teach freshmen the very basics of Java before they'd have their first classes. They'd have four days to come up with strategies and develop their robots and on Friday there was a tournament between all the developed robots. The best teams got a non-trivial prize (and bragging rights). It was really interesting to see which strategies the students came up with and how they changed from year to year. The amount of material provided really made a much larger difference than one might expect. Among the interesting challenges of Robocode is that the bullets you shoot are so slow that your opponent has ample time to dodge, so you need to predict their movement. On the other hand you can't see where your opponent is shooting so you need to guess and move elsewhere. It's really quite fun.