We were worried that this would considerably muddy the waters. If BlueJ were open source, we decided, then there is a clear risk that those people who really want these features will fork off the source tree and bring out there own versions (similar to the Emacs/XEmacs split, or many others that happened in the past). Many of the proposals are reasonable suggestions taken on their own, but taken together, they would completely ruin the system. This is in order to keep the system simple and clean. This has to do with feature creep: We get many requests to add features to BlueJ, and we reject most of them. Most importantly, we were worried about not being able to keep an easy, simple, consistent experience for beginning students. But there have always been some arguments against it as well. The arguments on the plus side are reasonable well known or obvious. There have always been arguments both ways. BlueJ was first published in 1999, and we had this discussion probably about once every year since. In our team, we have discussed the question of whether BlueJ should be open source quite regularly from the very beginning. In the past, we had consciously decided to keep the source closed. You can get a good flavour of the sort of thing students can accomplish in Greenfoot through the Gallery, with many of the uploaded scenarios making their source code available too, true to the spirit of computer science and open source software.A few days ago I promised to write down some of our thoughts about the open sourcing of BlueJ and Greenfoot. Michael manages to cover some fairly meety programming concepts through the projects he explores, which, for once, go beyond game development to model some complex real world situations (qv Tom Hoffman’s recent discussion of supermarket checkouts and Star Logo). It (and indeed Greenfoot) would also be within the grasp of bright, motivated students wanting to learn programming and happy to work independently – perhaps something for a G&T project? One of the book’s particular strengths is the way theory and practical work are very closely mixed: this is not a book to sit and read – it’s very much one which you work through, editing the code on screen in Greenfoot as you do. Whilst suitable for introductory undergraduate courses, it’s accessible and interesting enough to be used with upper secondary pupils, who’d find plenty of motivation and challenge. As Michael puts it in his introduction, “While Greenfoot is an educational environment, Java is not a toy language”. However, where Scratch, Alice and E-Toys all nod in the direction of the historically significant (and still used) Logo programming language, Greenfoot supports Java, with its users learning standard object-oriented programming in Java, admittedly within a development environment that makes working with interaction and graphics very easy. Like Scratch, Alice and E-Toys, it’s open source software, and as with these other examples, it’s a toolkit which lets learners start writing code for themselves, taking control of the computer and learning through problem solving and experiment, providing a powerful way of looking at the world. Greenfoot is one of the new wave of graphical programming environments written with learners in mind. It’s great to see Open Source Schools community member Michael Kölling’s new book, an Introduction to Programming with Greenfoot published.
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