That made the world nice and big, but still white. We ended up changing the parameters that specify the world to: We talked a bit about the idea that the world is a grid of cells (with a bit of scribbling on paper), and that we can specify the number and size of the cells.
#GREENFOOT ARRAYS HOW TO#
I told her how to look at the Mars source code, and here is what we saw: Sophie commented that the world does not look good, because it’s all white, and too small. She said “on Mars”, so we made a subclass of the built-in “World” class, called “Mars”, and hit Compile. Then I told Sophie that she has to decide where this game takes place. We started by creating a new scenario named “DrWho”. Since I had it already installed, that was easy. It might have been a bit longer, but less than 90 minutes.)įirst, we started up Greenfoot. (I hadn’t thought of writing this down beforehand, so I didn’t really check the time. This morning when I got up and sat at breakfast (I’m always the last to get up on weekends in our house, so everyone else was finished already), Sophie was there bugging me to get started. If you manage to get them into the situation where they have an idea, and they really want to do it, you’re half way there. It is not you telling them to do something, it is them who want to do something, and you’re just helping them along. They take ownership, and the roles are set. Let them decide the story, choose something they like. If you ever want to teach your own kid (or any kid) to code, this is really crucial: find something they really want to do. So, Sophie decided she wants to make a Doctor Who game. I’ll might get back to the details later, if we ever get around to making something happen in this game. Suffice to say: The hero is “The Doctor”, who travels through space and time and has various adventures.
#GREENFOOT ARRAYS SERIES#
Now, Sophie is a big fan of Dr Who, a long running (and when I say “long-running”, I really mean long-running: the series started 45 years ago!) sci-fi series of the BBC in the UK. So I suggested that first she would need an idea for a setting for the game. This is the kind of thing she had in mind when she, in the evening over dinner, asked me whether we could make a game. Over the last few days, Sophie had been playing Midnight Mansion, a platform/side scroller game. So here is my (hopefully continuing) diary of coding with my daughter… (Our results, live demo and source code, are at the bottom.) Afterwards, I thought it might be interesting to try to record the process we’re going through - see what happens. So I told Sophie that we’d start making a game tomorrow. I have often wondered how low in age you could take Greenfoot. I have used Greenfoot with kids (mostly about 15 years old), but more often I do presentations and workshops for teachers. Research into programming education, tool design, etc. So far, that has all been part of my research work.
#GREENFOOT ARRAYS CODE#
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. Now, there’s a challenge, if I ever saw one. (Well, only a few weeks away from being ten – at this age, a year still matters.) She has never written any code before. Yesterday, my daughter Sophie asked me to show her how to write a computer game. Some of the Greenfoot code shown can be written more easily in newer versions of Greenfoot, using newer API methods.) (Note: This post is more than 10 years old. Update: Part II, Part III and Part IV of this story are available now. First party of a journey of writing a Doctor Who video game in Java with my 9-year-old daughter.
0 kommentar(er)
