PP4S Home Page
Welcome to the PP4S Website!
The aim of the website is to provide valuable, but free, resources to help promote Pascal programming in schools by sharing ideas, knowledge and experience. We welcome contributions and feedback on the site. Please let us know what you think.
"Your site is great. It builds up talented young people's understanding of Computing and Pascal capability, understanding and skills in quite a simple way through use of various examples. It's very good for students that want to develop their computing talents independently. Pascal does seem to be preferred by quite a lot of schools nationally at the moment."
We have added this quote and others to support our reasons for encouraging you to learn Pascal at school.
- follow the instructions on Getting Started with Lazarus (updated to refer to a recent version of the IDE) or our section on Getting Started with Delphi;
- start to work through the first few tutorials in order;
- look at the student programs, starting with the more straightforward ones at the beginning of the table and also the first few using the Crt unit.
New! This update is confined to the development of Android apps in Oxygene for Java. See our tutorial section on the use of the Android Canvas before writing your first Android graphics code. We trust that our Android Game Framework will help you to develop your first game apps for Android devices.
New! We have extended Getting Started with Oxygene for Java to include advice for setting up and using Android virtual machines in VirtualBox to test Android apps. This is much faster than the inbuilt emulators. The AndroBOX virtual machine, which you can quickly set up and use, should be sufficient to test your first apps. More recent virtual machines have greater functionality.
The following paragraphs summarise additions made in the preceding update. You can see some site statistics at the bottom of this page.
We add three programs from new contributors. Reggie releases the first instalment of his interactive story, Trapped. See what you think of the "attempted humour" in the first chapter. The user of Arnav's BettingGame attempts to win money by betting on simulated results of Premiership matches, taking the presented odds into consideration. We have compiled and run Trapped and BettingGame using Lazarus on a Raspberry Pi. Nathan's Shoot is a simple but effective fun game based on the use of timers in a form-based application.
Max Foster contributes a cross-platform version of his NetworkChat that you can use for conversations between Raspberry Pi and PC users. We enjoyed testing this on the Arch Linux operating system on the Pi. For more experienced and resolute programmers we include instructions for setting up and using the Arch Linux operating system.
We provide a skeleton space-shooter application that you can use to become familiar with Oxygene for Java. You can make changes to confirm your understanding, then try an applet with much of the same code. We look forward to contributions of games based on the programming techniques demonstrated by the space shooter. We have updated Getting Started with Oxygene for Java to pass on what we have learned from our latest installation of the compiler and associated software (JDK, Visual Studio, Eclipse and Android SDK).
Site Statistics February 2013
The site contains:
- 340 pages of tutorial material for Pascal and 60 for Oxygene for Java;
- 57 student programs spread over 150 pages;
- 30 pages of resources such as the Getting Started series;
- 30 pages of challenges such as suggestions for programs, programs to complete and programs to debug;
- A general Pascal index with 285 terms linked to relevant pages
- A Pascal index with links to examples of the use of 255 routines;
- An Oxygene for Java index with 128 terms linked to relevant pages;
- An Oxygene for Java index with links to examples of the use of 147 methods.
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