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Greenfoot and GridWorld - the AP* Computer Science Case Study

Gridworld1

Why run GridWorld in Greenfoot?

Gridworld2

What do I need?

There are many things you get with Greenfoot, that you do not otherwise have this easily:

Integrated environment. The editor, compiler, and execution environment is all right there, ready to use.

More interaction. Greenfoot gives you more interaction opportunies. Interactively instantiate objects, call methods, inspect objects, drag them in the world, ...

Flexibility. Easily add new classes to GridWorld, add their own images, or change the image of existing classes.

Other scenarios. Once you are finished with GridWorld, or for a change in-between, work with some other scenarios in Greenfoot: games, simulations, and others. All interactive, all in Java.

Share. Let students publish their scenarios straight to the web and show their friends what they've done.

Path forward. Using Greenfoot, students can grow into writing much more interesting applications.

You can also watch a short video (13.5 min, 62.3 MB) showing Gridworld in Greenfoot.

Why would you not use Greenfoot for your AP course?

Drawbacks are that there are some differences in the testable source code: BoundedGrid has a different implementation, and UnboundedGrid is not yet supported.

You need to download and install Greenfoot, available from our downloads page.

Then you need to download the GridWorld scenarios for Greenfoot. (We call our projects "scenarios".) They are available here:

gridWorld-greenfoot3.zip

(If you are still using Greenfoot 2 or earlier, download gridWorld-greenfoot.zip instead.)

Unzip this file, start Greenfoot, and open one of the scenarios. (It contains the same three samples as the standard distribution.)

In each scenario, read the README file by clicking the 'Project Information' button.

For more information and questions, please use our Discussions feature.

* AP is a registered trademark of the US College Entrance Examination Board, which was not involved in the production of, and does not endorse, this web page.