Summer Camp using DrJava

With my Google Alert set for “DrJava”, I was notified about another website that mentions DrJava. It’s a blog post about the Alice summer camp. Here’s an excerpt:

The Alice Summer camps concluded last week. Starting from this week, we have the Java, Robotics and Graphics summer camps for High School children. The students who attend this Robotics summer camp are those who attended the Alice summer camp last year.

Well what do I say? I have enjoyed this week a lot. Students are taught Java on a very interactive IDE called Dr.Java. Also they are taught Java concepts using “Pictures”. In the sense, they have to write programs to modify pictures. “For” loop is taught in context of producing a mirror image of a picture, “If” loops are taught in the context of reducing the “red eye” effect in an image. I feel this is the best approach to teach children programming because they are excited working with pictures. So they have both fun and learning. However since it is just one week of Java, it is not much that they can do but definitely a good starting point to encourage them in the field of computer science.

We also got a response to a comment I left:

@Mathias Ricken:

I am very glad that you took the time to drop in a comment. Dr. Java was very user-friendly and easy to use by High School children. We have not had any problems till now. Kudos to the Dr. Java team of developers.

Thanks for the offer to help. I will surely get in touch with you if we need any help in the future.

I’m always happy when instructors choose DrJava, the best little IDE I know.

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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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