The use of MUPPETS in an introductory java programming course

• Authors: Kevin J. Bierre;Andrew M. Phelps
• Venue: CITC5 '04 Proceedings of the 5th conference on Information technology education
• Year: 2004

"The Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study" (MUPPETS) system has been under development at RIT for the last three years. This multi-user environment is designed to allow students to develop visible 3D objects in Java within a game-world environment with minimal knowledge of graphics programming. Students can interact with these objects through an interface built into the system. (Technical aspects of the MUPPETS system were previously published by the authors at CITC4) [1]. In testing the usefulness of MUPPETS as a teaching tool, we have developed a series of course modules that use the environment as its programming environment. The existing "Programming for Information Technology III" course is the ideal place to perform an initial test of this nature, as students have some base familiarity with the Java language but have not yet completed their undergraduate programming core. Students in this course have a final group programming project that we intend to use as the initial test, and develop further MUPPETS modules downwards towards the initial freshman experience. In the past students used a package called "Robocode", which is available from IBM [2]. This project involved programming a virtual robot that could "fight" in an arena according to some agreed upon set of rules, which were developed both as part of the Robocode package and discussed and agreed upon in lecture. While the students enjoyed this project, the proliferation of available code on the Internet for the framework led to this project being removed from the course. We have implemented a variant of "RoboCode" in MUPPETS that addresses the code availability issue and provides a more interesting and graphically rich environment for the students. This paper shall discuss the reasons for the implementation, what we expect the students will gain from the use of MUPPETS based project, and possible methods of comparing this approach to the methods previously used in this course. Also discussed are additions to the MUPPETS system made to facilitate its classroom use including a re-implementation of the Swing graphics classes such that 2D interfaces are available in 3D, and model loading and texturing tools that allow custom robot creation and customization.