Karel was invented by Rich Pattis, a graduate student at Stanford university in the 1970s. It was intended to teach the fundamentals of programming without the complexities that are present in many programming languages. To achieve this goal, Rich created an introductory programming language that students can use to teach a robot to solve simple problems. The robot was named Karel, after Karel Čapek, the author of the 1923 play Rossum's Universal Robots, which is where the English language got the word "robot".

The Stanford version of the Karel language shares many similarities with Python, so Karel feels right at home on CircuitPython. When used under CircuitPython, there is a little bit of initialization needed for the display and to set the initial state, and there is a function that will verify whether you've correctly directed Karel to the goal state. All of the other code that controls Karel is the same in CircuitPython as it is in the Stanford version, so you can copy that portion of your programs between the two, and they will work on both.

Parts

This project supports any CircuitPython device with a display of at least 240x240 pixels. Externally connected displays can work but require additional wiring. For the simplest setup, use a device with a built-in display; several options are listed below.