![]() I think, in building such a site, you need to address a number of questions: So, what makes this site work, when so many others have failed? Subscriber numbers of the Greenroom old (red) and new (orange) Lots of resources have been posted, and many interesting discussions are going on. Now, after eight months, we have about 900 people signed up. Then, at the end of March 2010, we finished our custom implementation of the new Greenroom, and we were amazed at the result: even though only half of the Google Groups subscribers moved over, we surpassed the old subscriber numbers within two weeks, and then they continued to climb. Over these first six months, about 170 people signed up. This gave us an excellent discussion forum, and quite poor storage of resources. The Greenroom is alive and well.įrom September 2009 to March 2010, the Greenroom existed as a Google Group. I am happy to say that we seem to have avoided that fate. (We have recently published a paper about this.) So, when we designed the Greenroom, we were very worried about meeting the same fate: spending a whole lot of effort in creating a repository site, only to have it die a slow, quiet death after a few short months. I am pointing to it here as a typical example. Now, I don’t want to pick on that one particular repository specifically. This went down to three in 2009, with one single submission (so far) in 2010. Looking at the recent submissions, it seems that only four resources were submitted in all of 2008. It was – as far as I know – opened in early 2004, and initially attracted a good number of submissions. A few months later, little is happening, resources are not maintained, few new resources are added, you can hear the cold wind blowing through empty spaces.Ī high profile example is the repository of resources on the ACM SIGCSE website (one of the largest organisations in computer science education). The typical pattern is this: A repository is opened, a flurry of activity follows, resources are submitted (often by the creators and other people personally involved or contacted), and then it dies down. The fact is, countless resource repositories have been created, and most of them have tumbleweed blowing down the main street. ![]() It is often said, with only slight exaggeration, that there are more teaching resource repositories than there are teaching resources. Yet, this is a space where many have failed. Having a community to talk to, to ask questions, to get ideas, to get tried and tested material, makes a huge difference. Greenfoot is different from many other environments, teaching with it requires different projects and different ideas, and thus getting started with it, as a new teacher, is challenging. It was clear for a while that sharing of resources was a powerful thing that was urgently needed for the Greenfoot community. The Greenroom is a web site where teachers who teach with Greenfoot can share resources and have discussions. Posted in Greenfoot, Java, Teaching | Tagged Greenfoot, Kinect | 7 Replies Sharing of teaching resources – it’s about people, not about stuffĪt the beginning of April this year, we opened a new web site: the Greenroom. But beware: you might stand in the middle of your room waving your arms around for the next few days! Some people might look at you strangely, but it’s great fun. If you are interested to try it yourself - here are the detailed instructions. ![]() Neil Brown, one of our developers on the Greenfoot team, has adapted open source server software that communicates with the Kinect and designed and implemented a Greenfoot library that makes access surprisingly simple. Programming the Kinect with Greenfoot is probably the easiest way to write programs with the Kinect module. Probably the easiest way to show what I mean, is to show you what I mean. This means that you can now write simple Greenfoot games that are controlled by players body movements. The most recent addition to Greenfoot is a library that allows programmers to easily use the Microsoft Kinect module with their Greenfoot scenarios. (Those of my readers who don’t know it should have a look here.) Those of you who know Greenfoot know that one of its aims is to make programming for beginners exciting and engaging.
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