1. Using Text, Games, and GUIs to Teach Java Barb Ericson Georgia Tech April 2006

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Games Simple games –NumberGuess –Hangman –Breakout Conditionals –GuessWho Arrays –Battleship –Tic-Tac-Toe –Checkers

6. 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/http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/jtf/ –Simplifies graphical user interface programming See 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

7. Assignment Ideas Nifty Assignments from SIGCSE –http://nifty.stanford.edu/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