From developer to developer i want to know what do you think of GreenFoot as my college will be using it next year and personally I think its a an advance version of scratch but allows people who have no experience of java to go straight into game dev.
We used it in our high school in 8th grade to teach some veeeeeery basic programming stuff.
You can change, rotate and move the sprites and set custom background tiles and add logic but doing anything complex goes against it’s intended use, which is learning OOP, basic java syntax and programming logic.
It forces you to use a grid and tiles and integer positions etc.
tl;dr -> it is not really for game development.
It’s horrible. Our school forced it on us as well. To be fair, I already knew Java when they started teaching it but unsurprisingly nobody learnt shit. If you want to learn Java, use a real IDE with code completion and formatter. I learnt Java mostly by reading through code completion, sources and documentation. Greenfoot offers none of that. Suppose you see the String class for the first time - without code completion you can’t just write “”. and see which methods the class has. Also newbies tend to mess things up horribly without a formatter. It may just be my opinion, but Greenfoot, BlueJ and all that crap is the perfect way to scare people away from programming because they make it super hard. Talk to your teacher and suggest IntelliJ IDEA or at least Eclipse. Show them my post. Just don’t let them ruin programming for everyone on your college. Well, they probably won’t listen.
I really couldn’t agree more dude, it is being forced at our college next year and its going to be crap 
Hi
Why do you claim that GreenFoot is an advanced version of Scratch? The latter is so easy that even 7-year-old kids can use it. I love Java but I prefer recommending Scratch. Moreover, I’m not sure that GreenFoot is available in several languages.
I personally despise greenfoot , whilst the concept is good the actual implementation is terrible , most of it isn’t java , custom commands are common and actually getting it to do anything is almost as difficult as just teaching them the language seperately. For college? thats just silly.
I’ve never used Greenfoot, but I understand the appeal of it. Teaching programming is hard, especially to people who have never seen a line of code before. Languages like Java can be even harder, because of how much boilerplate you need to know just to get something running.
From what I can tell, Greenfoot tries to eliminate that boilerplate and teach OOP, one of the hardest concepts for novices to understand, right from the start. I would say that these are good goals to have, and trying these goals is important if Java is going to reclaim any of the ground that it’s already lost to JavaScript.
I personally prefer Processing to fill that role, and if I were teaching the basics (which I would love to do), that’s what I would use. But Greenfoot is one of the earlier projects trying to accomplish these goals, which is one of the reasons it’s so popular. Now we have Code.org and all of its associated educational programming tools, but Greenfoot is still used.
But I guess the point is, if you don’t like Greenfoot, then your worst case scenario is that you’ll have to try stuff outside of class, which already was probably true.
Also: when you say college, do you mean “high school age college” or “university age college”? I never know what that word means on the internet…
I mean high school college i think thats right :o
Okay cool. Well that makes much more sense- starting out with Greenfoot in 9th grade or so is pretty reasonable, whereas it might seem a little too easy for a university class.
Keep in mind that you can write Java code with Greenfoot, so it’s not exactly as simple as Scratch. But mostly, if you want to dive in to “real” programming without Greenfoot, then you don’t have to wait for a class to do that!
You should check out Praxis LIVE too - it’s a hybrid visual IDE that can be used for interacting with Processing, including live code editing. Not primarily designed for teaching, but can be used as an easy entry point.
Said without the slightest bias 
Na Its 12th grade