CS320n –Visual Programming Classes, Objects, and World- Level Methods Mike Scott (Slides 4-1)

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 2 What We Will Do Today Look at ways of doing the fish problem from last time Define Classes, Objects, and Methods in Alice Define and create world level methods more complicated snowman movie

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 3 Fish Circling Around Island Smooth Jagged Play Movie

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 4 Larger Programs As you become more skilled in writing programs, you will find that your programs quickly begin to increase to many, many lines of code. –Fish program about 30 already –How many things can you keep in short term memory? Games and other "real world" software applications can have thousands, even millions of lines of code. Want to organize large programs into small manageable pieces –big rocks into little rocks

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 5 Classes, Objects, and Methods Alice uses classes, objects, and methods as basic programming components. –it is just one way to think about programming object oriented –there are many others These components help you to – organize a large program into small pieces – design and think about an intricate program – find and remove errors (bugs)

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 6 In your programs, you have been using… Classes – In Alice, classes are predefined as 3D models Objects – An object is an instance of a class. Class: Fish (Uppercase name) Objects: fish, fish1, fish2, fish3 (lowercase names)

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 7 In your programs, you have also used… built-in (predefined) methods – Examples: move, turn to face, say World.my first method – Example: In the snowpeople world (Chapter 2), we wrote program code where the snowman tried to get the attention of a snowwoman. As a reminder, see next slide…

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 8 Snowman Program

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 9 Snowman Program

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 10 More on the Snowman Program Snowwoman blushes and then turns back to her friend Snowman turns away and shakes his head Show Movie

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 11 Modifying the program Modify program to get snowman to try to get snowwoman’s attention twice To make this modification must add more lines of code –program getting longer, more complicated, more difficult to think about and understand, harder to make changes –program is suffering a “code explosion” Show movie of trying to get attention twice

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 12 Try twice to get attention Notice the wait command in between the two attempts to get the snowwoman’s attention –wait is one of the commands at the bottom of the method editor

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 13 Why is this “Bad”? Not hard to copy and paste code, right? Easy to simply say “make copy” of the Do together block and insert a wait … but, getting a little harder to maneuver around the program with all that code … and what if we want to change something about the getting attention behavior? –blink eyes twice or change duration of blink

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 14 A Solution A solution to the problem is to – define our own method – name the new method catchAttention Then, we can drag-and-drop the catchAttention method into the edit box just like the built-in methods

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 15 Demo: The solution First, to associate the new method with the World select the World tile in the Object Tree select the methods tab in the details area click on the "create new method" button

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 16 Demo A demonstration of writing the catchAttention method

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 17 World-level method catchAttention is a world-level method because it -is defined as a method for World if the method has instructions that involve more than one object it must be a world level method This method only involves the snowman so we could have made it a method for the snowman

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 18 Using the catchAttention method The catchAttention method is executed by calling (invoking) the method from my first method

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 19 Testing Method Independently Can test method by adding event to the program disable other methods

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 20 Why? Why do we want to write our own methods? – saves time -- we can call the method again and again without reconstructing code –Easy to make changes to behavior only have to change in one place – reduces code size – we call the method rather than writing the instructions again and again – allows us to "think at a higher level" can think “catchAttention" instead of “say “Toot” moving eyes up and down" the technical term for "think at a higher level" is "abstraction"

Visual ProgrammingClasses, Objects, and World Level Methods 21 Exercise for Class Do problem Chapter 4, exercise 2, Confused Kanga on page 110 of the book –see web for description