Category Archives: Software Tools

Teaching My Daughter To Code

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First party of a journey of writing a Doctor Who video game in Java with my 9-year-old daughter.

Update: Part II, Part III and Part IV of this story are available now.

(Note: This post is more than 10 years old. Some of the Greenfoot code shown can be written more easily in newer versions of Greenfoot, using newer API methods.)

Yesterday, my daughter Sophie asked me to show her how to write a computer game. She is nine. (Well, only a few weeks away from being ten – at this age, a year still matters.) She has never written any code before. Now, there’s a challenge, if I ever saw one.

I am a computer scientist, and one of our projects is Greenfoot – a programming environment designed to teach kids (and older students) to code with Java. So far, that has all been part of my research work. Research into programming education, tool design, etc. I have used Greenfoot with kids (mostly about 15 years old), but more often I do presentations and workshops for teachers.

I have often wondered how low in age you could take Greenfoot. It’s Java, after all, not Logo. 15-year-olds clearly works. But 10 year olds? We don’t know.

So I told Sophie that we’d start making a game tomorrow. That was yesterday. So today was the day. Afterwards, I thought it might be interesting to try to record the process we’re going through — see what happens.

So here is my (hopefully continuing) diary of coding with my daughter… (Our results, live demo and source code, are at the bottom.)

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Back to basics – new Greenfoot video

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Recently, I have announced the first Greenfoot tutorial video. Not an overwhelming success as yet (no nominations for Academy Awards or Emmys, no calls from Warner Bros. or the BBC). As far as I know, maybe not even a viewer yet… Alas, I shall not be discouraged. If nothing else, it gives me somthing to look back on in a few years and laugh at how funny my voice sounded…

The idea with these videos is to provide random tips and techniques of doing various things in Greenfoot. However, equally random as the choice of subject for these videos is my order of producing them: I started with “Making explosions” – a rather advanced tip for blowing things up. Not really the first thing you need to know when getting started with Greenfoot.

The idea is, over time, to build up a collection of short tutorials that cover a broad range, from basic tips to more sophisticated techniques. The order in which they will appear will, however, remain somewhat random. I record them according to whatever I happen to have on my mind at the time.

I realise, though, that the basics — getting started — is really what most people need to know right now. So I have recorded a first general introduction. Not really a programming tip, but a very quick overview of what Greenfoot is and what it can do for you. So if you are one of the great majority out there who haven’t got a clue what Greenfoot is, here’s a thing for you to look at and find out.

More to come in the near future.

Making explosions – a Greenfoot video demonstration

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Explosion

Many of you probably know that I am working on the Greenfoot project. The software itself is in public release and is very usable. What is lacking at the moment is documentation – good instruction that tells people how to do things.
Creating this documentation will be one of our main tasks over the coming year or so. This will take various forms – web pages, a book, work sheets, examples, videos…

I have decided to make a start with some videos. They will be slightly random in order, showing things which I happen to have on my mind. Over time, though, I hope to build up a collection that is somewhat ordered: starting with basic tasks, and moving on to more sophisticated things.

So, here is the first batch: it shows you how to make a nice-looking explosion in Greenfoot. The video tutorial is sliced into three parts, just to keep the file size manageable.

The Greenfoot Video Tutorials

Making Explosions, Part I (length: ~5 min, 11.6 MB)
Making Explosions, Part II (length: ~18.5 min, 57.9 MB)
Making Explosions, Part III (length: ~15 min, 52.2 MB)

These are all published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

You can also get the source code of the project developed in the video.

Have fun. And let me know if you turn this into an interesting Greenfoot scenario!

Every open system develops towards the unusable

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Kathy Sierra, on her excellent blog (which may have very sadly come to a close now, but that’s another long and sad story) has recently published a collection of her favourite graphics from the last few years.

Here is one that I really like:

Featuritis
(By Kathy Sierra, from http://headrush.typepad.com/,
shamelessly copied without permission – I hope she doesn’t mind!)

You should really look at the site yourself – there are many more great diagrams!

The Featuritis diagram above struck a nerve with me, since it’s something that’s been close to my heart for a long time. It is also related to what I think is one of the Natural Laws Of Software Development:

Every open system develops towards the unusable.

If you want to find out why I think that, read on.

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A License for BlueJ?

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Beer
BlueJ has always been distributed under a “free-for-any-use/free-for-non-commercial-distribution” license. We never bothered to come up with more detailed rules. Generally, I don’t like having to deal with licensing much.

But today, I came across a license that was new to me: The Beer License. Now, there is an interesting idea!

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Firefox conquers the world

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Browser
Some of the articles on this blog last week resulted in quite a bit of traffic. As I was looking through our logs to see what they looked like, one surprising thing stood out: the percentage of Firefox users.

The graph above (thanks to Google Analytics, an amazing web traffic analyzer service that we run here) shows the proportional distribution of browsers used to access this blog over the last week.

And the result is: Firefox is taking over the world…

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Movement – The Latest on The Microsoft Patent Application

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Cathedral1-SmallWhen I wrote the article about the Microsoft patent application on Friday, I hoped that the visibility it might generate would help our case against this application.

It did. And much more quickly and efficiently than I expected.

It seems that Microsoft will withdraw the application. They have apologised. And all that on a weekend.

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More on the Microsoft / BlueJ patent case

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Wow. That has caused a little more than a ripple.

Yesterday, I wrote the article titled “Microsoft patents BlueJ” about Microsoft’s patent application. I thought a bit of public visibility can’t hurt our case.

It certainly has generated some visibility. The story made the front pages of digg, slashdot, reddit and del.icio.us. The article has had more than 20,000 hits in the last 24 hours.

Many people have asked me to keep them updated, so I’ll do this with a short summary.

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