[macosxnerd101]

So what exactly did everyone who has taken (or is currently taking) the AP Computer Science class get out of GridWorld? Did you find it helpful in learning or practicing with OOP concepts? How about in learning to work with new APIs or Libraries? How did your instructor incorporate GridWorld into the curriculum? Was it a heavily emphasized component? And overall, did you feel this was a worthwhile portion of the AP Curriculum?

Discuss.

[Sergio Tapia]

It would be helpful if you explained what Gridworld is.

[macosxnerd101]

GridWorld is the College Board's API for use in the AP Computer Science class. We now have the GridWorld subforum in Java, along with a number of new subforums.

[cfoley]

What is the College Board?

[Dogstopper]

My instructor did not cover GridWorld's implications; he merely told us in general what it did. I certainly think it is useful for understanding external API's and such that students would not have normally discussed.

cfoley, on 02 October 2010 - 08:19 PM, said:

What is the College Board?

The people in charge of certifying the AP tests.

[gibson.nathan]

paxil

[Dogstopper]

gibson.nathan, on 02 October 2010 - 11:11 PM, said:

paxil

?

[bcranger]

Well...I was kind of disappointed with GridWorld actually...no offence but it kinda stinks...

Our instructor used it to teach inheritance but I had already covered that before the class so I was totally bored to death doing the labs...I suppose most people learned the concept of inheritance through making the different types of bugs, critters, etc but I was personally annoyed at having to look up the methods to use when doing the free response for the AP test

Wasn't exactly a heavily emphasized thing thank goodness!

Since the AB exam is gone now, I think more emphasis should be on the AB material and less on Gridworld.

[calebjonasson]

I never used it in school but when I did use it for a game that I was working on I may have ripped some hair out of my head. It was extremely annoying but in the end very functional for what I needed it for.

[bear(NP)]

I took the class / exam a couple of years ago and my instructor used GridWorld as our review two weeks before the exam. It really brought everything together for us, and it allowed us to connect everything from System.out.println all the way to polymorphism and abstract classes, in one go. I could see how it would be boring if you already knew the material, but our instructor let us edit the image files, so of course that added a certain aspect of epicness to it all. My bugs were smileyfaces, Tom Cruise and the dancing banana.

[m-e-g-a-z]

What is GridWorld? Never heard of it.

[Dogstopper]

GridWorld is an API developed by Cay Horstmann and the College board for computer science students. See my resource thread:
http://www.dreaminco...world-resources

[macosxnerd101]

bcranger, on 03 October 2010 - 01:12 AM, said:

Well...I was kind of disappointed with GridWorld actually...no offence but it kinda stinks...

Since the AB exam is gone now, I think more emphasis should be on the AB material and less on Gridworld.

I couldn't agree more. Whenever I worked with GridWorld, I always got a ton of Exceptions from the API. It wasn't clean to work with.

@bear(NP): We used it in a similar manner to reinforce inheritance and polymorphism. My teacher strongly emphasized not overriding act() for Critter, and instead overriding one of the five helper methods. Then for general AP exam tips, he emphasized substring(). So when we wrote a paper on computer ethics after the AP exam, we found ways to incorporate these into our papers.

[Dogstopper]

In contrast, we were told to override act() because the other methods were too advanced? WTH?