The idea behind Robocode is nice. Why does it take 7 semesters till somebody thinks of letting students program some silly combat bots to let them learn to code and have some fun at the same time? Even people that usually don't even touch code with a 10 foot pole suddenly hack away happily at their killer algorithms, high on motivation.

Somebody came up with a really smart idea: Show what you can use all those boring code stuff for. Perhaps even have fun while competing with other people around you and getting a kick out of it. And what does one learn programming with? Double linked lists and sorting algorithms that have been coded about a bangzillion times already.