Using Text, Games, and GUIs to Teach Java

Barb Ericson

Georgia Tech

April 2006

Why These Topics?

• Text– Basic text processing is important in computing– Women find playing with language fun– Students like to produce web pages

• Games– Boys often come to computing from a interest in

games– Both boys and girls can enjoy creating games

• GUIs– Students find graphics and graphical user interfaces

motivating– Practical applications of inheritance and interfaces

Working with Text• Parameter passing

– Write a form letter and pass in details such as the name and address to customize the letter

• Conditionals– Do a form letter with two different results based on some condition– Create a Web page with a different comment based on the current

temperature• Iteration and Conditionals

– Output the lyrics to a song where something changes each time through the song

• 99 Bottles of beer on the wall– Parse delimited strings

• Read text and create objects from the text– Search a web page for text to pull out of it – Search a program for text to change and change it

Working with Text

• Arrays and Classes– Create a fortune teller that randomly picks a fortune

from an array of fortunes– Create a random sentence generator that picks parts

from arrays of nouns, verbs, and phrases

• Lists– Create a fortune teller and after each fortune has

been picked remove it from the list– Create a random sentence generator and remove

picked items as you pick them from the lists

Games

• Simple games– NumberGuess– Hangman– Breakout

• Conditionals– GuessWho

• Arrays– Battleship– Tic-Tac-Toe– Checkers

GUI

• You can teach with awt or Swing components– But students may find this difficult– See the slides in the GUI folder– http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/index.html

• An alternative is the Java Task Force libraries– http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/jtf/– Simplifies graphical user interface programmingSee tutorial at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/jtf/tutorial/index.html

Demos at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/jtf/demos/index.html

Assignment Ideas

• Nifty Assignments from SIGCSE– http://nifty.stanford.edu/

• 2006– Book Number - deals with the ISBN, International

Symbolic Book Number, which involves error detection. – Breakout – create the arcade game breakout with the

Java Task Force libraries– Dancing Turtles – create a lead and follower turtle and

implement a conga line.

• 2005– Grid Plotter – teach about 2-D arrays and looping – Name Surfer – Search Social Security Data for Names