greenfoot

Henriksen, Poul; Kölling, Michael

doi:10.1145/1028664.1028701

Cited by 66 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…In 2004 we started work on a new system, named Greenfoot (Henriksen & Kölling, 2004) (Figure 3), which was first published in 2006. A number of different developments led to the decision to work on a new design.…”

Section: Greenfootmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons from the Design of Three Educational Programming Environments

Kölling

2015

International Journal of People-Oriented Programming

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Educational programming systems are booming. More systems of this kind have been published in the last few years than ever before, and interest in this area is growing. With the rise of programming as a school subject in ever-younger age groups, the importance of dedicated educational systems for programming education is increasing. In the past, professional environments were often used in programming teaching; with the shift to younger age groups, this is no longer tenable. New educational systems are currently being designed by a diverse group of developing teams, in industry, in academia, and by hobbyists. In this paper, the author describes his experiences with the design of three systems-Blue, BlueJ, and Greenfoot-and extract lessons that he hopes may be useful for designers of future systems. He also discusses current developments, and suggests an area of interest where future work might be proitable for many users: the combination of aspects from block-based and text-based programming. The author briely presents his work in this area-frame-based editing-and suggest possible future development options.In this paper we describe experiences with the design of a sequence of educational environments dating back more than 20 years. These systems are Blue (Kölling, 1999a), a programming language and development environment for teaching and learning object-oriented programming in a single, integrated system; its successor BlueJ (Kölling, Quig, Patterson, & Rosenberg, 2003), a similar environment using the Java Programming Language; and a third pedagogical system called Greenfoot (Kölling, 2010). Blue was relatively short-lived, but is of interest here because it heavily influenced the design of its successor, BlueJ. BlueJ and Greenfoot are both systems with significant user communities over a number of years (and still very much in use today), and have undergone many changes and adaptations since their first publication.In this paper we present a short history of these systems and discuss the goals and design rationale for each, their respective target groups and how these influenced design decisions, and their scope and application. Most importantly, we discuss lessons learnt from their use with actual users, and how those lessons shaped the design of the later systems, or later versions. We also discuss their relation to other educational programming systems, similarities, possible sequences of use, and future developments. The emphasis is not on providing a complete description of each system, but to identify the trends and goals at the time of their design, and how these have changed over time. Overall, we present some lessons we learnt along the way that we hope may be of use to designers of future systems.

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Section: Greenfootmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons from the Design of Three Educational Programming Environments

Kölling

2015

International Journal of People-Oriented Programming

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“…[12]). Environments such as Alice [6] and Greenfoot [15] have also been used successfully in outreach contexts. The cs4fn project (www.cs4fn.org) [8] takes a different approach: a free magazine and webzine taking leading edge research and presenting it in an offbeat way for school students.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enthusing & inspiring with reusable kinaesthetic activities

et al. 2009

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We describe the experiences of three University projects that use a style of physical, non-computer based activity to enthuse and teach school students computer science concepts. We show that this kind of activity is effective as an outreach and teaching resource even when reused across different age/ability ranges, in lecture and workshop formats and for delivery by different people. We introduce the concept of a Reusable Outreach Object (ROO) that extends Reusable Learning Objects. and argue for a community effort in developing a repository of such objects.

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“…In fact, they already mentioned a need for more social support. Thus it might be useful to consider three successful up-to-date environments that are designed for such purposes: Scratch [9], Alice [4,8] 1 , and Greenfoot [6]. Scratch and Greenfoot offer some kind of tagline on their websites.…”

Section: An Easy Takeoffmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual sandbox

Göttel

2009

Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children

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This paper highlights shortcomings of programming environments designed for novices to be used as a collaborative tool in game design. It also addresses these issues in the context of the bad image of informatics today. This article focuses on the graphical programming environment Scratch, which is well received by pupils and teachers. We will present observations on group behavior using Scratch in two projects at schools. The pupils were between 12 and 18 years old and had to design games within a week. Finally, we will introduce a Scratch mock-up to support collaboration, whose features were derived from our observations.

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greenfoot

Cited by 66 publications

References 10 publications

Lessons from the Design of Three Educational Programming Environments

Lessons from the Design of Three Educational Programming Environments

Enthusing & inspiring with reusable kinaesthetic activities

Virtual sandbox

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