Greenfoot as a teaching tool for a programming course: conference tutorial
Rajan Alex, H. Paul Haiduk · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2010
Greenfoot is an outstanding interactive environment for teaching the Java programming language. Through graphical programs and simulations, educators can use this software to teach general programming constructs and introduce the object oriented paradigm. Many a times teaching the first programming course can be dry, tedious, and boring. The purpose of this tutorial is to make teaching how to write programs interesting and enjoyable. We will use the built in classes World and Actor that are part of Greenfoot to create a stage and actors. By adding actors to a scenario, we will introduce the concept of classes, inheritance, and objects in Java. From the graphical user environment, one can look at the code to learn the syntax involved in creating a class in Java. Using animation of actors, we will show how the concept of sequencing, selection and repetitions can be taught in an attention-grabbing way. The goal of the tutorial is to have fun with activities in scenarios provided by Greenfoot and at the same time learn the basic programming concepts taught in an introductory Java programming course.