At the University of Kent I run a series of workshops (along with Christian Jacobsen) called Cool Stuff in Computer Science. These workshops introduce students to… well, cool stuff. Generally, in computer science. As the year progresses, we let their interests drive the workshops. In the beginning, however, we pick things we think will be both entertaining and, perhaps more importantly, open doors to interesting parts of the discipline that they can explore further on their own.
This last week was our first meeting of CSCS this year, and we took a look at Greenfoot. I put together a simple exercise, and gave them two scenarios to explore. The first got them into making agents move, and the second was a bit broader in scope—it was more for them to look at on their own than to drive a particular exercise. For a moment, I want to focus on the first of these two.
It was called “hippos”, and it conatined two kinds of agent: hippos and sheep. It was little more than a reworking of the Wombats scenario, but instead of using cute, furry wombats, it used little gray hippos and white fluffy sheep. Of course, I set these up as ill-tempered, flesh-eating hippos who liked nothing more than a muttony, fluffy snack!
This may seem silly, but when we introduced Greenfoot the year before, we used Wombats. This is a fun scenario, and the students did some interesting things. But this year, they did some wacky things. I mean, really funny stuff. One student introduced rage lemons, which (when a hippo ate one), it would go into a homicidal rage, eating every sheep it could find. Another student wanted the sheep to explode when eaten (introducing a new Actor that was, essentially, the explosion). Yet another quickly discovered exponential growth, as their “love hippos” would procreate beyond control… ultimately, causing Greenfoot to throw an exception.
My point? Greenfoot is a very compelling microworld. And perhaps this is a property of all microworlds, but the “creatures” we populate those worlds with probably effect the kinds of projects students do greatly. In the past, I’ve introduced AIDS dissemination or traffic flow models. This year, I gave them enough to make their Agents move around with very little preamble, and let them be creative. Put another way, I wonder if the simple choice of icons that you use for populating a Greenfoot microworld effects the way students approach the problem?
Given that my Mac was stolen a few weeks ago, I’m not terribly effective at taking screenshots and the like. However, I do have copies of some of their projects, and will make those available here over the next week or two as a series of posts. Largely, this is because I thought that, at a “Cool Stuff in Computer Science” meeting, the students had done some pretty cool stuff.
