"GridWorld" makes for a great world

Abstract

The Advanced Placement Computer Science curriculum has used case studies since 1995. For the 2008 examination, the APCS curriculum introduced the GridWorld Case Study. Students who have grown up in a world of computers want to be able to do something more exciting than compute the average of a list of numbers or the price of an order in their initial programming class. GridWorld allows students to manipulate animated graphical objects before they even know how to write a line of Java code. It provides an early introduction to methods with and without parameters. Students can easily see the inheritance chain and start extending classes in a natural way almost as soon as they start programming.