About this Course
Hi everybody,
great to have you here in the course.
This course is not about gaining points, it's about solving a problem and having fun with a practical programming task.
The Project
There are no weekly assignments. Your task is to work on a small project, from scratch, using the Eclipse IDE (Basically you could use any IDE of your choice, however, if you intend to participate in the peer assessment, your peers might not be able to rate your work).
You will start by designing your game in a small UML diagram.
Then you'll create a project in Eclipse. You'll learn about packages, importing projects, and adding libraries to your build path.
You will program a simple game using the GUI elements of Processing. On the way we will give you a quick overview on other libraries that are used in Java to build GUIs, such as AWT, Swing, and JavaFX.
At the end of the course you will have a running playable interactive game; we will show you how to share this game for distribution and how to export a runnable version of it.
While you are working on your project, we will introduce you to a set of Design Patterns that will allow you to improve the structure of your code.
Teamwork and Peer Assessment
You can work on this project either on your own or in a team.
The task and the evaluation criteria will be exactly the same for both. If you work alone or in a team, the project will be graded by Peer Assessment/Peer Review. If you decide to work alone, you will have to review three other submissions, if you decide to work in a team you only will have to review two other submissions (yes, that is right, no typo and we did not mix it up :) ).
Here are some short videos if you want to learn more about peer assessment and team peer assessment
All Course Videos are Optional to some Extent
- If you already have experience with Eclipse---just skip the IDE section.
- The Processing parts of the GUI section are important for the task to be solved.
- The Version Control section is important for the task, particularly, if you intend to work in a team. You can skip it, however, if you already know about git and GitHub.
- You will not need the Design Patterns section if you just want to go for a basic solution of the task. We recommend, however, to watch at least the MVC and Processing videos as these will help you to understand the framework we provided for the task.
Additional Exercises in the Design Patterns Section
These exercises are completely optional. We recommend, however, to solve them and to discuss them in the discussion threads we've prepared for that purpose.
Learning Journal
Instead of the short multiple choice self-tests, we've added a set of free-text essay questions for you to keep a personal learning journal. This is also completely optional. We've already created a Collab Space for those of you who are interested in merging your notes and collaboratively creating a course handout.
Discussion Forum
The discussions in the forum will be a vital part of the course.
To get started, we invite you to say hello and introduce yourself.
We've already created some threads to keep the discussions focussed.
Please use the thread Bugs, typos, what else needs to be fixed? to collect all the flaws that have passed our Quality Assurance.
Use the thread Teams, Collab Spaces, and Peer Assessment for all questions concerning the organisation of the course's task.
Use the thread Peer Assessment - How to grade? if
you're not quite sure how to grade a submission in the peer
assessment.
Badges, Certificates, etc.
This course will only provide Confirmations of Participation (CoP). You can achieve the standard CoP (as you know it from our other courses) by passively viewing (at least 50% of) the material. For those who successfully submit the task for peer review and achieve at least 50% of the available points, we will additionally provide an extended CoP that explicitly includes a statement about this participation. Neither of these CoPs will be graded.
The Timeline for this Course will be as Follows:
Registration for teams open: Thursday, September 6, 2018 11:59:00 AM (UTC)
Deadline for team registration: Thursday, September 13, 2018 11:59:00 AM (UTC)
Start peer assessment: Friday, September 14, 2018 12:01:00 PM (UTC)
Deadline submission: Thursday, September 27, 2018 11:59:00 AM (UTC)
Deadline evaluation: Thursday, October 4, 2018 11:59:00 AM (UTC)
Deadline results: Monday, October 8, 2018 11:59:00 AM (UTC)
We're looking forward to meet you in the forum and discuss with you.
Ralf and Tom