Learning objectives:
By the end of this session, students will not only have successfully installed Greenfoot and witnessed its capabilities through example projects but will also have engaged in collaborative, hands-on play within the development environment. This playful introduction sets the tone for an exciting exploration of game development, encouraging creativity, teamwork, and an enthusiastic approach to coding with Greenfoot.
Target audience:
Secondary school students attending the OOP4Fun course. Basic programming knowledge including variables, functions, iteration and selection concepts.
Materials&resources:
Greenfoot webpage and download instructions.
Examples prepared by the teacher.
Internet resources for identification of other examples.
Assessment:
This activity will enable teachers to give formative assessment feedback based upon the discussions and monitoring of students’ flipped classroom and teamwork.
The gamification represents non formal assessment but will increase the interest, intrinsic motivation and learning outputs of the whole group.
The peer-review assessment will be performed online as a part of a homework assignment. This will remind students of important aspects of the session, will make them install Greenfoot, open different examples and remind them of what was done during the class which will increase the overall achievement of learning outcomes.
Result dissemination:
In order to disseminate their results to teachers and fellow students the usual setup of the Learning management system (e.g. moodle will be used). The students can continue the discussion on the topic on the forum that is provided to them via the Learning management tool.
After the teacher introduces today's session, reflects on the previous session and sets challenging goals, the rush-hour challenge begins. Students are given the gamified assignment to find instructions, download and install greenfoot (yet unknown development tool for them) on their computers. The first three students are given tokens of appreciation (badges, points, scores, sweets etc.).
The second surprise for them is that in the next 30 minutes they will be playing games with the teacher. This is a teacher guided session on opening, compiling and running one-two simple example projects (on the introductory to medium level of complexity). This will show students the basic elements of the Greenfoot development environment as well as of basic procedures of handling the project files and assets.
Team collaboration and coding will have teams work collaboratively on trying to change something in the given examples. If they break the code beyond the line of being able to fix it on their own they can ask for help from the teacher or can download the “start version” again. This will be a good example why we should use version control systems when coding.
