Introductory UNIX courses are typically organized as lectures, accompanied by a set of exercises, whose solutions are submitted to and reviewed by the lecturers. While this arrangement has become standard practice, it often requires the use of an external tool or interface for submission and does not automatically check its correctness. That in turn leads to increased workload and makes it difficult to deal with potential plagiarism.In this work we present TermAdventure (TA), a suite of tools for creating interactive UNIX exercises. These resemble text adventure games, which immerse the user in a text environment and let them interact with it using textual commands. In our case the "adventure" takes place inside a UNIX system and the user interaction happens via the standard UNIX command line. The adventure is a set of exercises, which are presented and automatically evaluated by the system, all from within the command line environment. The suite is released under an open source license, has minimal dependencies and can be used either on a UNIX-style server or a desktop computer running any major OS platform through Docker.We also reflect on our experience of using the presented suite as the primary teaching tool for an introductory UNIX course for Data Scientists and discuss the implications of its deployment in similar courses. The suite is released under the terms of an open-source license at https://github.com/NaiveNeuron/TermAdventure. CCS CONCEPTS• Applied computing → Computer-assisted instruction.

For almost 25 years, the goal of the RoboCup has been to build soccer robots capable of winning against the FIFA World Champion of 2050. To foster the participation of the next generation of roboticists, the RoboCupJunior competition takes place in parallel and provides a similar challenge of appropriate difficulty for high school students. RoboCupJunior has three main categories: Soccer, Rescue and OnStage. For the Soccer category, participants need to design, build and program a team of autonomous robots to play soccer against an opponent team of robots. The competition is physical in nature, since it assumes physical robots playing against one another. In 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult for a competition of this type to take place, due to obvious restrictions on physical gatherings. To allow for some sort of participation, and inspired by positive experience of the larger RoboCup community, the Organizing Committee of RoboCupJunior Soccer has explored porting a portion of the challenge to a simulated environment. Many of the existing environments, however, are built for higher education/research teams competitions or research, making them complex to deploy and generally unsuitable for high school students. In this paper we present the development of SoccerSim, a simulated environment for RoboCupJunior Soccer, based on the Webots open-source robotics simulator. We also discuss how the participation of students was key for its development and present a summary of the competition rules. We further describe the case study of utilizing SoccerSim first as a testbed for a Demo competition, and later as part of RoboCup Worldwide 2021. The participation of more than 60 teams from over 20 countries suggests that SoccerSim provides an affordable alternative to physical robotics platforms, while being stable enough to support a diverse userbase. The experience of using SoccerSim at RoboCupJunior Worldwide 2021 suggests that a simulated environment significantly lowers the barrier to entry, as evidenced by the participation of many teams that have not participated before. To make it easy for similar competitions to take place in the future, we made the code of SoccerSim available as open-source, as well as the associated tooling required for using it in a tournament.

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