Orespics: a friendly environment to learn cluster programming

This paper presents Orespics, an environment to learn concurrency. Orespics supports a didactic methodology inspired by the constructionistic theory and based on the resolution of 'real life problems'. Students program microworlds using a language based on the integration of the Logo turtles commands along with a set of message passing constructs. The environment includes a window based interface and a set of tools to define the characteristics of the microworld, the behavior of the agents, and to monitor the execution of the program. The paper presents the programming language and shows the main functions of the environment using a concrete example.