Greenfoot @ SIGCSE 2007 (Free iPod!)

SIGCSE 2007 in Covington, Kentucky is going to be an exciting place for Greenfoot activity. Michael is leading a workshop on Greenfoot, and we will have some space (free iPod!) at the Sun Microsystems booth in the exhibition space for presenting Greenfoot and talking to people who are interested in this really cool software.

What might be (free iPod!) of interest to people who will be attending the conference is that there will also be a Greenfoot programming competition! We’re not sure if there will be any prizes yet (iPod!), but we’re hoping we can come up with something. (OK, OK, I’ll cut the suspense. At the least we’ll have some Greenfoot mugs and t-shirts.) The competition will require you to use some of your decentralized Java chops to develop agents who can “get their agent on” better than (did I say iPod Nano?) anyone else’s agents.

In particular… we’re going to give you Greeps. These little aliens just love tomatoes, and your job is to make sure they’re well fed. I’d show you a screen shot… but I don’t want to give too much away right now. I suppose I could let you see what the Greeps look like, though:

20070304-Greeps

I had to blow that image up a bit, and it doesn’t (really! a nano!) look as good as it should… but I think you get the idea that these are some evil, vicious… tomato eating… cute… aliens that are set to take over the wo… ravage gardens everywhere.

So join us at SIGCSE, and check out the programming competition. Perhaps we’ll even have some kind of MP3 player as one of the prizes… ;)

20070304 | | Tags: , | Comments Closed

Rage Lemons!

A few weeks ago we had a Cool Stuff in Computer Science session dedicated to Greenfoot. Cool Stuff is an extra-curricular “course” open to students at the University of Kent where we explore… well, things they think are cool. Sometimes, we focus on things we think they’ll think are cool. (Did I get that right?)

Anyway, what I like about using Greenfoot in the classroom is the unpredictability of what students will do. I started things out by showing them “termites”, which is a world I created based on a world in StarLogo/NetLogo.

Termitessmall-1

Termites! (~400KB MP4, click to play)

Then, I introduced them to the (mostly empty) Hippo world.

Hippoworld

A hippo world

Now, I think the introduction matters. I sold them on hippos on the (false) belief that hippos are kind, friendly creatures that love nothing more than to wallow about in the water. Now, in truth, hippos are cantankerous creatures that are not to be trifled with. And, I think (but am not sure) that they are omnivores. They eat meat. I think.

Regardless of whether it is true, in my world, hippos eat sheep. Poor, defenseless, dumb-as-rocks sheep.

And that was it. Some introduction to how Greenfoot works, and how you actually add behavior to an Actor, and they were off. “Do something cool” was the extent of our instruction that evening.

The first world I’d like to share with you is Rage Lemons (hippos-ragelemon.zip). Below is a 2MB movie (MP4 encoded as well) of the hippos in action.

Ragelemons

Rage Lemons! (click to play)

You see, in this world, Hippos and Sheep live together, peacefully. Until, of course, a Hippo eats a Rage Lemon! At that point, the Hippo goes bezerk, eating any and all Sheep it comes across. Eventually, the powerful effect of the Rage Lemon wears off, and the Hippo resumes its normally peaceful life.

20061219 | | Tags: , , | Comments Closed

New user-contributed world!

John Pais wrote the greenfoot-discuss mailing list (sign up here) to announce some neat worlds that implement quizzes in Greenfoot.

screen-quiz

Now, I think this is just wacky. I mean, who knew you could do stuff like this with Greenfoot? I didn’t. Poul and I had a fun time seeing if we could answer questions designed for students at the Advanced Placement Computer Science level. It turns out, Poul doesn’t actually know anything about object oriented programming!

(OK, so I’m kidding. We got the right answers. But it is funnier to think that Poul doesn’t know anything about object-oriented programming. ;) )

You can download John’s world from the Greenfoot scenarios page.

20060913 | | Tags: , | Comments Closed