Greenfoot in Problem Solving and Artificial Intelligence

Presented at The 10th China-Europe International Symposium on Software Engineering Education, Chengdu, China

Greenfoot is an interactive environment based around Java that enables two-dimensional graphical games and simulations to be set-up relatively simply. Currently maintained by the University of Kent, UK and La Trobe University, Australia, it provides a piece of free software (under a GPL licence), multiplatform and is multiplatform.

In this paper its use within the teaching of problem-solving and artificial intelligence will be considered. Three case studies of it use will be considered:

·        Exercises in developing problem solving within a problem-solving and programming module.

·        Greenfoot for a problem solving assignment within a problem-solving and programming module.

·        Use of greenfoot within a module on artificial intelligence.

Greenfoot in Problem-solving and Artificial Intelligence from Scott Turner

School helps Primary School with Computing Problem

A member of the School of Science and Technology helped a local primary school look at ways they could add some programming into some of their ICT lessons. The Greenfoot software (http://www.greenfoot.org/overview) and tutorials (http://www.greenfoot.org/doc) were used to demonstrate some possible ways this could be done. This type of activity is similar various people are trying around the country to persuade children that programming is fun and not as hard as some people may tell them (see Coding for kids is as easy as Pi  for another example)


This Greenfoot work forms part of the on-going out-reach activities the School of Science and Technology, University of Northampton is actively working in partnerships with schools. Other examples include:

• Junkbots
• Outreach during Science and Engineering Week 2012
• Girls into Engineering summary
• BeSwitched On - Taster Day for computing
• Dancing robots

For more details on any of these please contact Dr Scott Turner

Greenfoot and robots

One of the criticism of the using robots for teaching problem solving is they are finite resources, there is a risk that some students will dominate the programming in group work. To address this a new feature has been added to the teaching of problem-solving activities. There are now two parallel activities  as well as programming a robot; there is a separate programming exercise carried out at the same time which replicates some of the same actions of the robot but this time on screen.

Figure: Robot pushing a barrel

These exercises are based around the increasingly popular Greenfoot software (http://www.greenfoot.org/download/) which is free to download and use. This can be put on as many machines as are need enabling more people to have a go at programming.

The exercises initially gets participants to set-up the world, place a robot within it and get the robot to move across the screen. Building on the each previous exercise, the complexity increases and includes challenges (such as in the figure) where the robot pushes a piece of rubbish (in this case a barrel) off the screen.

A series of other activities based around controlling a robot or robots in an environment has been developed. 

The nice feature of both the robot and Greenfoot exercise of these is that all the activities are Java based. The extra feature that Greenfoot provides is flexibility. The students can download this at home and work on it on their own machines, whereas the robots can't be taken home.
Anecdotally, initial student feedback has been positive, with some students creating solutions to some of their own problems.

Some of the material can be found at: http://www.computing.northampton.ac.uk/~scott/greenfoot_ex/sco1/default.htm