Making Programming More Approachable

Tools for AP Courses

Laurie White

Mercer University

APCSDC

A Short History of Learning to Program

• It used to be fun to see a computer add two numbers.
• Now it's not.

Some Solutions

So, how do we make programming more engaging?

Historical solutions include:

• Turtle Graphics
• Logo
• Karel the Robot
• Robocode

Some More Solutions

Current solutions, to be presented today, include:

• Greenfoot
• Alice
• Jeroo
• Scratch
• Squeak

Organized from oldest to youngest audience, more or less.

Today's lecture

A whirlwind tour of as many of these as we can get to, so you can decide which you'd most like to revisit. The ones we're presenting have the positive features.

• WWW sites with impressive support
• On-line tutorials
• No cost

And they are far more powerful than they appear at first sight.

Greenfoot

• A master's thesis by Poul Henricksen at the University of Southern Denmark
• Direct Interaction Tool for Software Engineering Education
• Originally aimed at high school students
• The inspiration for the GridWorld interface

Greenfoot

Available at greenfoot.org

The Greenfoot Gallery at greenfootgallery.org was recently announced.

A related project is BlueJ, an interactive Java environment, at bluej.org

Alice

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web.

Provided by Carnegie Mellon.

Alice

Available at alice.org

Story Telling Alice, a version of Alice designed for middle school students, is also available at the Alice site.

Alice 3.0 is also on the way soon. It will allow story creation with both drag and drop and text entry.

Jeroo

Jeroo is a tool that helps novices learn fundamental concepts of object-oriented programming, including

• Instantiating and using objects
• Writing methods to extend behavior
• Selecting and using fundamental control structures

Jeroo

Available at jeroo.org

Thanks to Georgia Tech.

Scratch

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Scratch

Available at scratch.mit.edu

Advanced Ideas in Scratch

Scratch has the ability to respond to events and to communicate between sprites. Message passing is a fundamental technique in parallel computing. Let's consider the problem of the Dining Philosophers.

The Dining Philosophers

• Philosophers sit around a table and think and eat.
• There is a chopstick between each pair of philosophers.
• When a philosopher is ready to eat, s/he takes the adjacent chopsticks one at a time.

See for example the Wikipedia entry.

The Dining Philosophers in Scratch

Squeak

Available at squeak.org

Amazing things have been done with Squeak. Consider Alan Kay's presentation at Etech and his work at Viewpoints Research.

Start up Squeak