Java Zoo a Tool for Interactive Java Instruction

Games have been a form of entertainment for centuries and used to focus and motivated which is a great feature that can be utilize games as the basis for creating game-based educational applications. Games are part fun and part leisure, trying to educate using games is very interesting, but care must be taken in designing the game interfaces as they should be simple, attractive, usable, and at the same time portray the concept of learning. Many students have found Computer Science as a very challenging subject and some of the most challenging for some new CS1 students is their first programming language. We lose many students to other majors at the level of CS1 and can weed out potential great future computer scientists. In our computing department, Java is the first programming language and many students have problems with it because they do not understand the concepts of classes, objects, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. It has been found that games motivate students and focuses them for long period of time. With long periods of time being required to have basic functional understanding of programming language, games can play an important role for intrinsic motivation. We propose a Java game called “JavaZOO” to demonstrate the concepts of programming by mapping the animal kingdom to the object-oriented design principles

Evaluating Hank, a cognitive modelling language for psychologists

Hank is a visual programming language devised specically for the use of cognitive psychologists rather than computer programmers. This paper introduces an eighteen month evaluation project on the use of Hank. This project began on November the 1st 1998, the initial findings and planned evaluation programme will be presented at the workshop in January

Beltway: Getting Around Garbage Collection Gridlock

We present the design and implementation of a new garbage collection framework that significantly generalizes existing copying collectors. The Beltway framework exploits and separates object age and incrementality. It groups objects in one or more increments on queues called belts, collects belts independently, and collects increments on a belt in first-in-first-out order. We show that Beltway configurations, selected by command line options, act and perform the same as semi-space, generational, and older-first collectors, and encompass all previous copying collectors of which we are aware. The increasing reliance on garbage collected languages such as Java requires that the collector perform well. We show that the generality of Beltway enables us to design and implement new collectors that are robust to variations in heap size and improve total execution time over the best generational copying collectors of which we are aware by up to 40%, and on average by 5 to 10%, for small to moderate heap sizes. New garbage collection algorithms are rare, and yet we define not just one, but a new family of collectors that subsumes previous work. This generality enables us to explore a larger design space and build better collectors