Game programming in introductory courses with direct state manipulation

Abstract

While the introduction of object-oriented programming slowly moves down the age groups -starting from advanced university courses, to introductory courses, and now into high schoolsmany attempts are being made to make object-oriented programming introduction less abstract and theoretical. Visualisation and interaction techniques are being applied in an attempt to give students engaging and concrete experiences with objects. Recently, the greenfoot environment has been proposed as another step in this development. In this paper, we describe new functionality in the greenfoot environment, especially the addition of user interaction programming via direct state manipulation. Direct state manipulation provides very low overhead graphical I/O handling at a level that makes it feasible to guide students to simple graphical game programming within a few weeks, while concentrating on fundamental object-oriented concepts in the structure of the program.

Methodology of Teaching Software Engineering: Game-Based Learning Cycle

“…The idea of games for learning programming technologies is based on program code visualization that helps learners to understand the idea of programming paradigms. Examples of such games are: the games based on Turtle graphics [6,7], different modifications of Karel The Robot [8,9,10, and the games BlueJ [11], DrJava [12] and Alice [13,14] and so on.…”

Teaching Object-Oriented Software Engineering through Problem-Based Learning in the Context of Game Design

“…The learning context of the authors' choice is game de velopment [2,12]. Almost every student is familiar with video games and plays them.…”

Pex4Fun: A web-based environment for educational gaming via automated test generation

“…Various programming environments such as Alice [13], Scratch [12], [11], and Greenfoot [9], have been provided for instilling fun into students' programming-learning experiences, especially for beginner learners. These programming environments have achieved significant success [22], [6] in helping teach and learn programming concepts for beginner learners.…”