Due to the empirical success of reinforcement learning, an increasing number of students study the subject. However, from our practical teaching experience, we see students entering the field (bachelor, master and early PhD) often struggle. On the one hand, textbooks and (online) lectures provide the fundamentals, but students find it hard to translate between equations and code. On the other hand, public codebases do provide practical examples, but the implemented algorithms tend to be complex, and the underlying test environments contain multiple reinforcement learning challenges at once. Although this is realistic from a research perspective, it often hinders educational conceptual understanding. To solve this issue we introduce EduGym, a set of educational reinforcement learning environments and associated interactive notebooks tailored for education. Each EduGym environment is specifically designed to illustrate a certain aspect/challenge of reinforcement learning (e.g., exploration, partial observability, stochasticity, etc.), while the associated interactive notebook explains the challenge and its possible solution approaches, connecting equations and code in a single document. An evaluation among RL students and researchers shows 86% of them think EduGym is a useful tool for reinforcement learning education. All notebooks are available from https://www.edugym.org/, while the full software package can be installed from https://github.com/RLG-Leiden/edugym.

翻译：由于强化学习的实证成功，越来越多的学生开始学习该领域。然而，根据我们的实际教学经验，我们发现进入该领域的学生（本科生、硕士生及早期博士生）常常面临困难。一方面，教科书和（在线）讲座提供了基础知识，但学生很难将数学公式与代码进行对应。另一方面，公开代码库虽然提供了实践示例，但其中实现的算法往往过于复杂，且底层测试环境同时包含多种强化学习挑战。尽管从研究角度看这很贴近实际，但往往阻碍了教育中的概念理解。为解决这一问题，我们推出了EduGym——一套专为教育设计的强化学习环境及配套交互式笔记本。每个EduGym环境均旨在阐明强化学习的某个特定方面/挑战（如探索、部分可观测性、随机性等），而相应的交互式笔记本则解释该挑战及其可能的解决方案方法，将数学公式与代码整合在同一文档中。面向强化学习学生与研究者的评估显示，86%的参与者认为EduGym是强化学习教育的有效工具。所有笔记本可通过https://www.edugym.org/获取，完整软件包可通过https://github.com/RLG-Leiden/edugym安装。