Sub Ubi

Michael opens up on ICT education in the UK in PC Pro:

It’s like giving children a calculator but never explaining the underlying principles of multiplication. “Teaching children office-automation skills borders on child abuse,” says Dr Michael Kölling, the University of Kent academic, who’s attempting to get the Greenfoot software we’re using for our tutorial into schools across the country. “The main problem for us is they call it computing. Kids think that’s computer science. It isn’t productive, it doesn’t stimulate interest. Children should be creative, they should get the joy and satisfaction that comes from seeing their ideas take shape.”

His point is that Greenfoot is a much more engaging environment for students to be programming in then, say, doing spreadsheets in Excel. He’s right: forcing 13-year-old students to learn Excel macros is a form of child abuse.

Today, I got up at 3AM, caught a cab to Stanstead airport, flew to Bratislava, took a bus to Vienna, and then spent the day walking around the city. Admittedly, I took a 1-hour nap in the park… but it was such a beautiful day, one just made for napping in the sun. It was glorious.

We had a wonderful dinner of salad, bread, and cheese with an excellent friend and former housemate, enjoyed a few pints of Budvar, and we’re about to head to bed. But… while relaxing in the park this afternoon, I put together the most recent edition of Greenfoot Adventures.

Why? Because I knew that some things Simply Must Be Done.

So, here it is: Day Two of Greenfoot Adventures: Das Toys.

You can download the most recent version here, or catch all three:

1. Greenfoot Adventures Day Zero: In Search of the Perfect Scenario (17MB PDF)
2. Greenfoot Adventures Day One: The Search Continues (13MB PDF)
3. Greenfoot Adventures Day Two: Das Toys (31MB PDF)

I thought I’d take a second to see what Technorati had to say about Greenfoot. Surely, the entire world must be talking about Greenfoot by now, right?

Well, not exactly.

However, I did find some cool things.

Masood Mortazavi was hanging out in the .org zone, and saw the Greenfoot team. Now, I didn’t know there was a .org zone (Poul just sends pictures, not, you know, information), so that’s kinda cool. I had a chance to hang out with some of the Derby and OpenJDK peeps at SIGCSE recently—good projects if you’re keen on JavaDB and the open-sourcing of the Java stack.

Je ne parle pas beaucoup de Francais, mais Greenfoot, c’est internationale! (Really, I had three years of French over a decade ago. That’s about as good as it gets.)

And I’m guessing this is a University of Kent student; they’ve apparently revamped their weblog, and have been tackling the creation of a microworld in Greenfoot. All I can say is that I hope they keep at it, and if they have any questions, to hit us via email (or some other medium).

Greenfoot recently was mentioned on ZeroNave.it. My Italian is worse than my French, so I won’t be writing anything in that language. I do like the comment “Greenfoot (piede verde?) !”, however. Yes, yes, it is called “foot green.”

Interesting. I’d call it navel-gazing, but I don’t think feet have navels… not even green ones.

In the first episode of Greenfoot Adventures, we left our colleagues lost in San Francisco, trying to find the ultimate Greenfoot Scenario. They rode all over this hilly city, and found nothing more than a big bridge. Silly Greenfooters! There are no Golden Gate Bridges in Greenfoot Scenarios!

So, I present to you, the second edition of Greenfoot Adventures, where the team is presented with a 2007 Duke’s Choice Award at JavaOne, yet are still unsuccessful in finding the Ultimate Scenario. In part, this is because no scenarios have (yet) been submitted to the MyGame site, and as a result, noone is in danger of winning the competition.

So, I present to you Greenfoot Adventures: The Search Continues. In case you missed the first edition, they’re all linked in here.

1. Greenfoot Adventures Day Zero: In Search of the Perfect Scenario (17MB PDF)
2. Greenfoot Adventures Day One: The Search Continues (13MB PDF)

Greenfoot was selected as one of the 2007 Duke’s Choice award winners, which was presented on May 8th at JavaOne. This is a very, very big deal. I’ve already seen some companies doing big, nifty press releases; those press releases are boring compared to what I do, so you should be glad you’re reading this instead of those press releases.

What is Greenfoot, and how did it win this award? Ah! Well, Greenfoot is a very exciting microworld where you can program all kinds of exciting environments in Java, and watch your creations interact in ways that you (possibly) never expected. You can check out the Greenfoot site for tutorials, examples, screenshots and the like.

So, in the next post, I’ll continue my series of press releases surrounding this very exciting event: Greenfoot Adventures! That’s right, in celebration of this award, I’ve developed an entire web comic chronicling the adventures of Poul, Michael, Cecilia, Ian, and Bruce in San Francisco, as they search for the ultimate Greenfoot Scenario!

Yeah, it’s definitely that cool.

I’m pleased to say that for the last few months that I’m in Canterbury, I’ll be working more closely with the Greenfoot team on some very cool stuffs.

Today, Michael announced the opening of the JavaOne competition. This competition will leverage MyGame, a site put together by James Gosling to support the team’s presentation of Greenfoot at JavaOne. Programmers will be challenged to develop the most compelling entry (based on community voting). I’ll be posting more about it as the contest evolves—just know that your entries could win you a SunSpot (a very cool Java-powered, embedded device), or your participation through voting and reviewing could earn you a Greenfoot T-shirt! (I have two. I’m not sure why, but I have two. They’re awesome. If you don’t have one… well, you’re still kinda cool.)

While it wasn’t possible for them to bring their blogger to JavaOne (humph!), I will be helping develop MyGame into a full-peer application in the BlueJ/Greenfoot pantheon. Our goal is that it will become a long-running service to the Greenfoot community, providing a showcase and rallying point for people writing scenarios in this very cool object world. Along with this, I expect I’ll be keeping up on the Greenfoot blog a bit more (as it will be Justifiable as Work), and will be taking some more time to demonstrate the most recent (and very cool) features included in Greenfoot.

So, watch this space!

Michael posted a complete gallery of photos from the contest on the Greenfoot site. He did not, however, capture our top winner in a reflective, contemplative pose:

“I can beat that guy…”

Joe Coglianese showed that professors from big-name Universities have to get to work on their Greenfoot chops pretty early in the morning if they’re going to beat a hard-hitting high-school teacher. The competition was great, really–it was so much fun to see people hacking, submitting, tweaking, submitting… trying to get their Greeps to exhibit that critical bit of emergent behavior that would score more tomatoes than anyone else.

Our winner, observing from afar… sneaky.

It was impressive how many people were drawn to the Sun booth by Greenfoot; I like to think that the combination of the activity and Sun’s presence fed off of each-other very nicely. Some people came by to find out what Sun had going on, and some came by to see Greenfoot–and they usually asked questions about both. That was cool, although from time-to-time I found myself answering questions about OpenJDK, the J2ME stack, JavaDB, and OpenSolaris. (Yes, you can run OpenSolaris in a VMWare virtual machine.)

And it was also very cool to talk to people about the ideas they had for teaching with Greenfoot. So many people were coming up with such cool ideas for how they wanted to get students playing with this environment. I’m hoping they find their way back and share some of their stories, as I’d very much like to do some interviews, ask questions, showcase student work, etc. in this space. The more we share with each-other regarding our use of Greenfoot in pedagogic contexts, the more we all benefit.

Why? Because Greenfoot is amazing. See? Look. This next photo proves it:

Greenfoot is amazing

LOOK AT THAT! Look at how amazed I am by Greenfoot! Mercy. I can’t be more amazed than that. Michael is amazed too, which you can tell even from his back–look at how excited his shoulders are! Ian (left) isn’t all that amazed, but that’s because he used to program in Postscript, and is now scarred for life. However, there are people in the background who are about to be as amazed as I am, but they’re slow on the uptake. Dennis (behind me) in particular: not terribly observant, that one. In a moment, he passes out from the excitement of Greenfoot. He gives new meaning to the words “completely floored.” Really, Greenfoot is absolutely amazing, it is.

…

(I did not pose for that picture, and I did not have to ask Poul to take it several times before we got just the right expession of amazement on my face. That was a completely natural, un-planned expression of just how amazing Greenfoot is. Really.)

(And yes, I had fun writing this post.)

First thing in the morning, we have a crowd waiting to get their updated and new submissions in. It began at 9:30 AM, and from then until the closing at 10:20, everyone was frantically updating and tweaking their Greeps until they were lean, mean, tomato-eating machines.

The doors finally closed on submissions, and the top three from the open competition were then run against each-other. They had one run each; the highest score won an iPod Nano, and the next two won a very stylish Greenfoot mug.

Sadly, everything went by very quickly, and I don’t have the names of our champions! However, I do know our grand prize winner was a high school teacher, and will post video of some of the winning solutions after I get my hands on them.

At this point, we’re all very tired Greenfooters, and are going to take it easy for the rest of the day.

Somehow, we went from day -1 to day 2. In truth, I should have labeled “Day -1″ as “Day 0″, at which point things would make more sense.

*cough*

Today we’ve had a great response on the Greenfoot competition; in fact, things have been hotting up all afternoon as people come and go from the Sun Microsystems booth with their improved Greep programs. Sadly, I was too busy handling questions when we had really big crushes, but I do have some snapshots of the booth. I’m using the camera built into my MacBook, which is nothing to write home about… but it’s good enough for blogging!

Me!

The booth (or part thereof)

Ian and Poul

So, it’s good fun. I’m certainly having a good time, and lots of friends are coming by to say hi, and in some cases, be surprised by Greenfoot. It is awesome.

So, like a good Greep, I’m going to go tomato-hunting…

The day began for many of us (coming from Kent) at an unreasonably early hour. Poul and I, for example, were marvelling that we felt “wide awake!” at breakfast… at 6:30AM. This is, of course, because we’re still in GMT, and you tend to wake up kinda early in EST.

Poul is spending the day at the Doctoral Consortium, and I spent my morning stuffing bags for the conference. This evening is the Greenfoot workshop at SIGCSE; I don’t think there are any slots left, which is OK… as it is, it’s going to be a tough session. Michael is taking a nap in preparation, as 7PM to 10PM is… well, midnight to 3 AM in GMT, and one day is not enough time to get over the lag. I may be there as well, and will report on the workshop afterwards. It should be a lot of fun.

At some point, we’ll get things set up at the Sun booth as well; the iPod for the competition has been purchased, and I’ll make full details available here when it is released/announced.

I think I’m going to try and forgo the nap… but that might be a bad idea…