Marla Parker's Weblog

I visited Westmont High School today and helped the Intro Programming students set up a public_html/index.html file to use as a journal of their programming experiences. Their journals are "public" within the class, unlike the rest of their home directories which are set up to be private, visible only to the student and the teacher.

Some of them had already created applets, but they just loaded them into the browser directly from the file system. Now we will have them put applets into a subdir in public_html when they are ready to share them with the rest of the class.

Most important, to me, I showed them CodePoint 2008, the first annual Greenfoot Coding Contest, and urged them to enter. Some of them are under 16, some of them are over, so in theory, the class could win in TWO of the three categories for the contest! Hey, it is most certainly possible. They asked if I would enter myself, in the third category of everyone else who is not in school. I said yes of course! And I will, though since we sponsored the prizes I wont be able to win, and since I'm not a seriously experienced Greenfoot player yet I would not win in the general category anyway.

Here is my non-game scenario, in its current state.

In my copious spare time, I want to add some user controls to control the two booleans that I currently set manually in the code: bounce (makes the balls bounce off the edges of the world or else fly right through and come out on the same trajectory on the opposite side) and dirByColor (makes each of the seven colors start out with the same direction of movement, a direction that is unique to that color).

See if you can figure out how those variables are set in the above and below versions of the same scenario.

The giant dot is just dot #1 that I made large because I was experimenting with the img.scale method. Its size is meaningless and has no function at the moment. Scroll down to click on Run to see the dots go, click on Reset to restart them. Not very exciting but it is kinda pretty and it was fun to make it work.

Obviously this could be turned into a game - make a big dot eat the little ones; introduce a new creature that eats dots and let the user control it; give two players control of different dots or colors or etc.