programming – Premier Award

Premier Courseware of 2010

Greenfoot Integrated Development Environment and Dynamics Animation were announced as the Premier Courseware of 2010 at the 2010 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference on Friday, October 29, 2010 in Arlington, VA.

Greenfoot Integrated Development Environment

Poul Henriksen and Michael Kölling, University of Kent; Davin McCall and Marion Zalk, La Trobe University

[ Greenfoot Website ]

Greenfoot Integrated Development Environment

The Greenfoot Integrated Development Environment is a pedagogical tool for teaching computer programming that allows students to use the full Java programming language to create games and simulations. The Greenfoot system greatly enhances student motivation while reinforcing Object-Oriented Programming concepts. Greenfoot is a resource that can be used by instructors to support their teaching of programming concepts through the use of animation and process scenarios. Students instantiate objects into an onscreen world and then create Java code that courses the object, generally a character related to the scenario, to perform certain actions and responses to other objects encountered in the surroundings. The Greenfoot Integrated Development Environment provides facilities for sharing programming resources and usage advice as well as to post finished programming projects that are of general and entertainment interest to student users.

Dynamics Animations

Richard Stanley, Kettering University

Dynamics Animations

Dynamics Animations are interactive animation software for an introductory dynamics course. The web-based animation is directly linked to a dynamics assignment, and no programming is required of the user. The software is designed to guide students to expose and explore dynamics concepts—and misconceptions. The software provides considerable choice to the user regarding the depth of exploration. Novice students may vary only the required parameter to answer the question that is being asked. For more experienced students, faculty can ask more complicated questions involving the same scenarios; these advanced scenarios typically require changing additional parameters.

2010 Sponsors

About the Premier Award

The Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware was developed by NEEDS—A Digital Library for Engineering Education, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and the Synthesis Coalition to recognize high-quality, non-commercial courseware designed to enhance engineering education.

Premier Courseware of 2007

Arcade was announced as the Premier Courseware of 2007 at the 2007 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference on Friday, October 12, 2007 in Milwuakee, WI.

Arcade

Kirk Martini, University of Virginia

Arcade

Arcade is a structural analysis program for nonlinear dynamic simulation. It is based on a computation method widely used in computer games. This method gives the program unique game-like interaction where structural models respond to input from the mouse and keyboard in real time. The program has been successfully applied in topics ranging from entry-level statics to graduate-level structural stability.

Finalist Candidates

Jeliot 3

Niko Myller, Andrés Moreno, Roman Bednarik and Erkki Sutinen, University of Joensuu and Ronit Ben-Bassat and Mordechai Ben-Ari, Weizmann Institute of Science

Jeliot 3 is a program animation system intended for teaching and learning introductory programming. All steps in the execution of a program (expression evaluation, control flow, method calls, parameter passing, variables and object allocation) are animated on a “stage,” adjacent to the pane displaying the source code. The animation is fully automatic. Students and instructors need not make any modifications to the source code prior to animation. Animations can be executed continuously (variable rates are available) or step-by-step. Jeliot 3 has been employed in numerous programming courses worldwide and empirically evaluated in several classroom and laboratory studies.

JFLAP

Susan Rodger, Duke University

[ JFLAP Website ]

JFLAP is software for experimenting with formal languages and automata theory and can be used with a course in Formal Languages, Discrete Mathematics, or Compilers. With JFLAP one can create and test automata, pushdown automata, multi-tape Turing machines, regular grammars, context-free grammars, unrestricted grammars and L-systems. One can also experiment with LL and SLR parsing and proofs such as converting an NFA to a DFA, to a minimal state DFA and to a regular expression.

Premier Courseware of 2010

Premier Courseware of 2010

Greenfoot Integrated Development Environment

Dynamics Animations

2010 Sponsors

About the Premier Award

Premier Courseware of 2007

Premier Courseware of 2007

Arcade

Finalist Candidates

Jeliot 3

JFLAP

2007 Sponsors

About the Premier Award

Premier Award Ends after 16 Years

Premier Award