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://sites.google.com/view/edu-gym/home, while the full software package can be installed from https://github.com/RLG-Leiden/edugym.

翻译：由于强化学习在实证上的成功，学习该学科的学生数量日益增多。然而，根据我们的实际教学经验，初入该领域的学生（本科生、硕士生及早期博士生）常常面临困境。一方面，教科书和（线上）讲座提供了基础理论，但学生难以将数学公式与代码相互转化。另一方面，公开代码库虽提供了实践案例，但所实现的算法往往过于复杂，且底层测试环境同时包含多项强化学习挑战。尽管从研究视角看这符合实际，却往往阻碍了教育过程中的概念性理解。为解决这一问题，我们提出EduGym——一套专为教育设计的强化学习教学环境及配套交互式笔记本。每个EduGym环境均针对强化学习的特定方面/挑战（如探索、部分可观测性、随机性等）而设计，配套的交互式笔记本则阐述该挑战及其可能的解决方案，将数学公式与代码整合于同一文档中。面向强化学习学生与研究人员的评估表明，86%的受访者认为EduGym是强化学习教育中的有效工具。所有笔记本可通过https://sites.google.com/view/edu-gym/home获取，完整软件包则可通过https://github.com/RLG-Leiden/edugym安装。