I’m late, I admit it.
A day late, to be exact. Yesterday (23 August 2009) was BlueJ’s 10th birthday.
As BlueJ’s version history shows, BlueJ 1.0 was released on 23 August 1999. It was born in Australia – in Melbourne, to be more exact. The project went through various changes, ending up spread across the world, with one half of the team still in Melbourne, and the other in Canterbury in the UK.
It’s not to be taken for granted that a university project survives that long, so I am really grateful to all members of the team – past and current – and to the extremely supportive user community for sticking with it for so long.
Happy Birthday BlueJ!
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In the past, a question that often came up after people had implemented their Greenfoot scenarios, was: How can I give this game I made to my friends?
For a while now, Greenfoot has an answer to that: the Export function. Greenfoot can transform scenarios into stand-alone applications, prepare them to run in a web page, or even publish them to an open web server for the whole world to see and play.
Since this is a FAQ, I have made a video that explains this i more detail. Enjoy!
Play video 
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mik Greenfoot, Software Tools export, Gallery, Greenfoot, video
A few days ago I promised to write down some of our thoughts about the open sourcing of BlueJ and Greenfoot.
In the past, we had consciously decided to keep the source closed. Now we decided differently. So that brought about the change?
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mik BlueJ, Greenfoot, Software Tools, Teaching BlueJ, Greenfoot, open source
Greenfoot programming is – on the whole – reasonable straight forward. At least if you know how to program in gerenral. Still, there are a lot of things that can be done well or less well. Here are some of the things I came across while writing a few scenarios that I found helpful.
Maybe you will as well.
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mik Greenfoot, Programming, Teaching coding, Greenfoot
CodePoint 2008 – The 1st Annual Greenfoot Coding Contest – opens for business on 15th October.
If you use Greenfoot, or if you like writing Java programs, or if you want to win a great prize, have a look at the web page for
CodePoint 2008
You can win a Wii Games Console, or an iPod Touch, or even a Greenfoot coffee mug!
Technorati Tags: Greenfoot
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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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Greenfoot is finally getting proper support for mouse input. This has been the single most requested feature for some time. This means that you can now write games that use the mouse as a control. Such as Minesweeper.
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Welcome back, dear readers, to the fourth part of Sophie’s journey of writing a DrWho computer game with Greenfoot and Java.
If you have read the previous parts, then thank you for sticking with us for so long! (If not, you may like to start reading here: Part I, Part II, Part III).
I’ll try to make it short today – it’s been a long day, and it’s getting late. But this programming session I’d like to record took place five days ago, I have only sparse notes, and I’d like to get it down before I forget too much. I have been busy this week, so I haven’t had time to write this up earlier, but there was so much lovely and encouraging feedback on the previous posts that encouraged me to continue writing this up.
Thus, without further delay, on to the next task: Reaching the TARDIS with the energy pellets!
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The third part of my endeavours to write a Dr Who computer game with my daughter
If you’re reading this, then you probably already have an idea what this is about: An ongoing project to write a Dr Who-themed computer game with my daughter Sophie, who is 10 years old. (Yes, she’s 10 now – it was her birthday earlier this week!)
This is the third part of this story. In part I we got the Doctor to move, and in part II we added some Daleks. This time, we giving the Doctor something to do, something worthy of the last of the Time Lords: Collecting energy pellets for the TARDIS.
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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
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