Teaching Java using Greenfoot to KS4: Week 2

Introduction

We now offer OCR AS Computing to our KS4 pupils as an alternative to the GCSE ICT course. Pupils will study this course over two years; it is normally done in one year by 16-17 year olds but given the excellent students we have here, I think they will cope. Just under 50% of the pupils opted to do this course when they had to make their choices at the end of Year 9. There is no coursework in the OCR AS computing course (which ironically means we will be able to do more practical work as we won't have to jump through hoops).

The pupils are all girls in a high-performing grammar school. They have all had some experience writing code in previous years; they have used Scratch to write a shoot-em game, VB.net to produce a web browser, Logicator for flow charts and html to produce web sites. Pupils on this Computing course will have three 50 minute lessons a week in both year 10 and 11; one lesson is intended to be a pure theory lesson and they will also have a double lesson lasting 1 hour 40 minutes in a computer suite. I expect them to do about an hour or so a week of homework. Pupils will primarily be learning Java. The main IDE we will be using is Greenfoot (excellent and free). We will be working from the Michael Kolling Greenfoot textbook and using resources from the Greenfoot website. We may dabble with other languages and IDEs.

The broad plan for the first year is to program program program by teaching pupils how to write computer games. I intend covering as much of the Greenfoot textbook as possible and as much of the Programming unit (OCR Syllabus F452) in year 1, and then the theory parts (F451) in year 2. By the end of the first year, I want the pupils to be able to confidently write their own computer games.

Wednesday 14 September 2011

Week 2 - Chapters 1 onwards

Had some really excellent lessons this week in the computer lab. We spent 5 minutes going over some of the terms from last week in a round-the-class Q&A session. The pupils seem to know what most terms are but need more practice in clearly explaining them, and using "for example" to get across what they mean. We spent 10 minutes doing some revision on methods, return values and parameters. By jove, they seemed to have got the ideas pretty quickly. Very impressed!

So, they were then asked to open the text book and begin! They had all read chapter 1 for homework so they were asked to work through all the tasks and then press on to the next chapter. Some had reached the beginnings of chapter 3 and random numbers an hour and a half later although a few had had a head start and done quite a few of the tasks in the first few chapters already, which was great to see.

What was particularly good was that some of the pupils were playing around with the code in ways that weren't asked for in the book. For example, some had inserted their own images and backgrounds into the scenarios and a few had worked out how to insert sounds when certain events occured. There was a lot of laughing going on but all focussed on the wacky things they had discovered how to do. Greenfoot seems to be performing really well so far. I was surprised at how little I was needed! I had a few problems with missing closing brackets and had to explain how the random number generator worked but that was about it - I spent most of the lesson dishing out the praise and getting them to look at each other's great work.

By the end of the lesson, there was quite a spread of progress. I think I need to do some tests for each chapter, to ensure that they aren't going too fast and skipping bits out at the expense of learning everything in a chapter. On the other hand, giving them free reign to experiment with Java and have some fun programming, getting them hooked, seems like the right thing to do, before hitting them with too many tests or too much theory!

Tomorrow will be back to Earth - 50 minutes on expressions using relational and Boolean operators and introducing the idea of the selection construct using the IF statement to test expressions.