[Bluej-discuss] External libraries (e.g., Becker's robots library) and interactivity

[David Furcy]

Hi,

I have recently downloaded Byron Weber Becker's robots library and was planning to use it in my CS1-type course this fall. I successfully set up BlueJ to use his jar file. The provided examples as well as my own work fine. However, I have run into problems when using BlueJ in an interactive way, namely creating objects and calling their methods by clicking, as we do in our first lab of the course. I have been using the "Use Library Class" menu option in order to use the provided Robot and other classes. This is pretty tedious since, for each interaction, one needs to type in the whole path to the class or value (say, becker.robots.Direction.EAST) both to call the constructor and fill in its parameter values. I was wondering is there is an easier way for my students to do this. I could probably have the library classes show up in their own project sub-directory by extracting them from the jar file. Is this the best way to go about it?

I would be grateful for any advice/pointers on the most student-friendly way to use external libraries right at the beginning of the course where I would like to spend a minimum amount of time (ideally none) talking about packages, etc. 

Finally, if someone has actually used this particular library with BlueJ, I would really appreciate if you could get in touch with me since I am having additional trouble getting the robot to move in the simulator when interactively calling its move() method. Thanks in advance,

David


--
Dr. David Furcy, Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department               
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
furcyd at uwosh.edu
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/furcyd
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