Marla Parker's Weblog

Young Developers and Play 2 Learn
I was already a fan of the New to Java Programming Center, but now Dana Nourie has made it even better by creating a page for Young Developers which features one of my favorite tools, Greenfoot.

In fact, I've been playing with Greenfoot myself, in hopes of learning to use it well enough to be able to teach middle schoolers how to use it, mostly for fun, with learning being a happy side effect, at an after school club I have proposed to the school that is closest to my house. (My son is horrified. I told him he does not have to admit to anyone that I'm his mom. He does not even have to come, but I bet he will.) The after school club is by no means certain yet -- the district loves the idea but has warned me: "Sometimes things in education move at a slower pace." So we'll see.

I have also played with Alice, another fun game-tool featured on the new page, but since I can only learn one thing a time....here is a picture of my Greenfoot scenario.

I may eventually turn this into a game, or others might, but for now, I just want to add controls so the user can set parameters that I'm setting right now in the code: bounce off the wall or go through and wrap around to the opposite side, continuing in the same direction; start with random orientation or start with color-coded orientation, so all the blue dots have exactly the same direction of motion at first anyway. Another visually fun thing was to make all the dots jump to the location of the mouse, if you mouse over the field of dots. I'm working on making things happen when the dots meet in space, like delete a dot or merge them (a bigger dot) or merge the colors or start playing follow-the-leader.

When I am happy enough with this to share it, I will post it to the Greenfoot Gallery along with the sources. If I had the experience or time right now to figure it out, I would replace the image above with a playable applet, but that will have to wait for a later post, and a better version of my consequences scenario, more worthy of posting live.

Update.......OK so now I've done the export, a month or something later, and duh, it is so drop dead easy! I should have made it live way back when I did this post.