Teaching Java using Greenfoot to KS4: Week 10

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.

Monday 5 December 2011

Week 10 - Arrays

We ran through one and two dimensional arrays in class, comparing them to using a bunch of variables. We talked about setting up an array and how we can visualise a one and two dimensional array. We then dry-ran initialising them, writing to and reading from them.

New challenges were set around arrays. Pupils were given a program that used an array and asked to comment each line. They then were told the data to use and had to do the trace table for it. Then they had to get some small array-based problems working, extending them as they went.

BBCBASIC is a really good introductory language to use. The more we use it, the more I am impressed. It's very forgiving, pretty clear and uncluttered and there is enough help out there to make life easy. If I had to be critical, I don't think the debugging tools are very good. Pupils really need to be able to step through the code and trace the path, watch variables and elements change. But as an introduction, it's superb and will be part of future teaching plans from now on.