What’s Happening 5th October 2012

Hi Guys,
We’re meeting again at the Kinsale Community School at 7.00. Here’s what’s going on:

  1. Scratch: This week you can create a game called Dog’s Life. It’s like a very simple Tamagotchi. Here are the instructions which you should print out for Friday if you can: DogsLife. Parents: If you can help out please try and take a look at these notes before Friday 🙂
  2. GameMaker: Lots to learn here! You can go through the tutorials and start to plan that new game!
  3. RoboCode: Jim’s back and he’s ready to code! Remember, you will need to be writing code for this (semi colons and all that stuff), so this is probably for the older ones. See below for some instructions from Jim on getting RoboCode installed on your computer – don’t worry if you can’t get it working, we’ll try and help on Friday.

See you there,
Nick Grattan.
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For installation, you simply go to the Robocode site and install the standard installation for the development and simulation environment. There isn’t another IDE required, although they do support Eclipse (and others, I think) for more sophisticated IDE integration. Do you think we should stick to the self-contained Robocode environment….part of me does, as this is easiest to get everyone working together with.
The main Robocode site is: robocode.sourceforge.net
The downloadable installer is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/robocode/files/latest/download?source=files
For Robocode to work, Java is required on machines, so there is likely that some users won’t have a Java runtime environment. This is a little trickier to get installed, because there are different sites that can be used to get a Java runtime (or Java SDK) environment installed.