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For the past few months, we have worked on creating the Greenfoot Gallery – and now it’s finally officially open.

The Greenfoot Gallery is a place for people to publish their Greenfoot scenarios, and try out other people’s work, comment on it, rate it, etc. Think of it as a kind of YouTube for Greenfoot games. Have a look!

You can use the Gallery (look at scenarios, play) straight away, or you can create an account for yourself to comment on them or upload your own.

Uploading content to the Gallery is easy: Use the ‘Export’ function in Greenfoot, and you’re almost there.

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mik Greenfoot, Java, Programming, Software Tools Greenfoot, Java, Programming

Second part of my endeavours to write a computer game with my daughter

A few days ago, I have written about starting to teach my daughter some programming by inventing and implementing a game with Greenfoot and Java. Here’s the second part of that journey.

This time, I had thought a little more in advance about what might be a good thing to tackle next. Putting floors in, so that the Doctor would just walk on those levels (and ladders to go up and down)? Or other moves: jumping, ducking, etc?

I decided the most interesting thing would be to put some opponents in – other actors that you could run away from, and who could catch you. With the Doctor, it’s pretty obvious who that should be: the Daleks! (They are the Doctor’s prime enemy, after all.)

When I came home from work, I suggested this to Sophie. Happily, she agreed.

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mik Greenfoot, Java, Programming, Teaching coding, Dr Who, Greenfoot, Teaching

First party of a journey of writing a Doctor Who video game in Java with my 9-year-old daughter.

[Update: part II, part III and part IV of this story are available now.]

Yesterday, my daughter Sophie asked me to show her how to write a computer game. She is nine. (Well, only a few weeks away from being ten – at this age, a year still matters.) She has never written any code before. Now, there’s a challenge, if I ever saw one.

I am a computer scientist, and one of our projects is Greenfoot – a programming environment designed to teach kids (and older students) to code with Java. So far, that has all been part of my research work. Research into programming education, tool design, etc. I have used Greenfoot with kids (mostly about 15 years old), but more often I do presentations and workshops for teachers.

I have often wondered how low in age you could take Greenfoot. It’s Java, after all, not Logo. 15-year-olds clearly works. But 10 year olds? We don’t know.

So I told Sophie that we’d start making a game tomorrow. That was yesterday. So today was the day. Afterwards, I thought it might be interesting to try to record the process we’re going through — see what happens.

So here is my (hopefully continuing) diary of coding with my daughter… (Our results, live demo and source code, are at the bottom.)

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mik Greenfoot, Java, Programming, Teaching coding, Dr Who, Greenfoot, Teaching

Two computing practitioners from an Ada shop in New York, Dr. R.B.K Dewar and Dr. E. Schonberg, who are also professors emeritus at New York University, have recently slammed Java as a first programming language. Their article has received quite a bit of attention and created wide discussion.

I think they are completely barking up the wrong tree.

Dewar and Schonberg report some observations, and than jump to conclusions that are not in any way supported by the observations or their argument.

Specifically, they state that today’s students are lacking certain skills (low level programming and formal methods), and then go on to blame the use of Java as an introductory language for this problem.

To state my conclusion upfront: They describe a badly designed curriculum, and then blame one programming language for the education’s problems.

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mik Java Java, Teaching

Over the last couple of weeks, I have started to look in more detail into the proposals for adding closures to the Java language. The most discussed proposal right now is the BGGA proposal, so I’ve been concentrating on that one first.

To say it up front: I have always had some doubts about adding closures to Java, but with this proposal I am firmly in the “contra” camp.

I had originally intended to write up my views of the proposal here, and the problems I see with it, but I don’t think that is necessary in detail anymore. Several other people have recently done this.

If you’re new to this debate, I suggest you start by reading some of the following: There is, firstly, the original BGGA Closures proposal, Josh Bloch’s The Closures Controversy talk, in which he discusses some of the problems, and Neil Gafter’s response to Josh’s presentation.

And now there are two very nice commentaries, one by Bharath, and one by Tim Bray, both of which I very much agree with.

So, instead of repeating their arguments, I’d just like to add one different aspect to this debate: Looking at the Java Language design from an HCI perspective.

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mik HCI, Java Java

Recently, I wrote a blog post titled “Can Java be saved from death by feature bloat?“, that commented on some of the feature proposals for Java 7 (and some existing ones).

This post generated many comments. Some of them are so stupid, that I feel compelled to respond.

What I really want to get across with this is: I really like Java. It’s a great language, and most of the language zealots haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about.

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mik Java Java

We all agree that Java needs simplicity – we just don’t agree what that means.

Several things came together recently that made me think about simplicity in the Java language again, and what that might mean. And one thing is clear: simplicity is not simple!

Events that prompt me to write about this again were feedback I recently received about another blog entry (where I discussed simplicity in more general terms), a discussion by the Java Posse guys about new language features, and my own teaching. (First term is about to draw to a close in our parts of the world, so I’ve just been through 12 weeks of teaching another cohort of freshmen programming in Java again.)

The executive summary is: I think many of the recent discussions for changes to Java are in danger of pulling the language downhill fast, and the term “Simplicity” has different meaning to different people that cause directly contradictory results for language design.

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mik Java Java

Java has undoubtedly been the most popular language of the last decade.

It has taken over large parts of the educational and professional sector. It is its use as a language for programming teaching that I want to talk about today.

Java has been dominating introductory programming teaching at universities for years now. But is it time to throw it out?

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mik Java, Teaching Java, Teaching