Greenfoot

Last year I gave a programming lecture for a special class sent and sponsored by the government (DIKTI). I have no formal CS background, but I do programming a lot for my research. The class participants were mostly new to the programming world. So, I could not start with an applied programming lecture without mentioning some basic programming principles first.

Then, I was looking for an appropriate didactical tool and found BlueJ. It is a nice tool for learning object-oriented programming (OOP) using Java language. The interface is quite simple and rather self-explanatory. BlueJ seems to be designed with a strong didactical background to make the users familiar with OOP. I was using BlueJ for the lecture, even though I used the text from Lewis & Loftus.

Several time later, I realize that Greenfoot which is also developed by the BlueJ personals, is actually more interesting. Greenfoot enhances BlueJ with graphics. In Greenfoot, you can see "the thing" you program and you are dealing with as good as you can see its action. It can be used to develop simple game scenarios. And someday it might become a more sophisticated 2D Java game framework.