Greenfoot, one of our development environment, has a new feature. And it is one of my favourite features so far: You can export your finished Greenfoot scenarios as a stand-alone application or, in fact, straight to a web page.
Category Archives: Programming
More about Greenfoot sound
As the next Greenfoot release nears, and I mentioned sound support in my last post, there’s now a short demo video available. It shows smooth animation, and sound support in Greenfoot (in an “Asteroids” scenario).
Watch it here.
And come the next Greenfoot release, do it yourself!
And the best thing about it (or at least one of the best): this whole program is written with only about 280 lines of code (in Java)! Not too bad, I reckon.
Greenfoot gets sound
Greenfoot, the microworld framework we’re working on at Kent, is getting closer and closer to providing a full game programming platform.
Initially, it was designed for simulations. Then it got key control. Now it gets sound.
Continue reading
I Object
A change occurred recently in the discussion of introductory programming teaching: the procedural backlash.
Suddenly, respected and experienced teachers start claiming that teaching object orientation early is not only difficult, but impossible. Procedural programming once again is supposed to be the solution, with objects having to take a back seat.
This development is not only questionable and unfortunate, but wrong and dangerous.
Read the full article here.
What’s wrong with syntax colouring?
Syntax colouring – the annotation of source code with different colours for keywords and other syntactic tokens – has become standard in just about all development environments. Yet, it often does not make sense.
I don’t mean to say that it does not make sense at all to use colour to annotate source code. On the contrary. What I am saying is that almost all syntax colouring systems colour the wrong things.