CodePoint 2009 is the second annual Greenfoot Coding Contest. Enter and win one of the great prizes.

The prizes: 3 Nintendo Wii games consoles 3 iPod Touch (8GB) 5 Greenfoot T-shirts The prizes were donated by Pearson Higher Education, the publisher of Introduction to Programming with Greenfoot. The theme: The theme for this year's challenge is The environment, conservation and global warming The challenge: Invent an interesting Greenfoot scenario relating to the theme given above, implement it, and submit it to the Greenfoot Gallery. Submissions get scored in a number of categories (details below). The best submissions at the end of the competition win the prizes. Pay attention to the theme. Your scenario can be of very different types (it might be a game, a simulation, a visualisation of data, an educational interaction, whatever you like), but it must relate to the theme. The time limit: The competition runs from 26 October 2009 to 4 December 2009. Submissions must be made within this time.

Rules and details

Please read the following rules carefully.

• All contest submissions must have been created by the submitting author(s). All authors must be credited. Third party code must be clearly identified as such.

• Submissions will be made into one of three categories:

  • school under 16 (pupils in a primary or secondary school under the age of 16)
    (to qualify for this category, participants must be under 16 years old on 26th Oct 2009)

  • school 16+ (students in the secondary education system at 16 years or over)

  • beyond school (everyone out of the secondary education system, e.g. university students and other adults)

• Submissions must be made to the Greenfoot Gallery. Contest participants must have a valid Gallery account.

• Contest submissions must be tagged with a specific prescribed tag for the contest age category. The tags to be used are codepoint-09-under-16 / codepoint-09-school-16+ / codepoint-09-general

• In each category, the winner will win the first prize; the runner-up entry wins the second prize.

• Winners will be judged by a panel consisting of the main members of the Greenfoot development team. The judges' decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

• Submissions will be judged according to specific criteria. The judges will decide the winning entry by considering:

  • originality / creativity (Is the submission a new idea, or have we seen it before?)

  • theme match (How well does this submission relate to the theme? It might relate by being educational, informative, present data or a viewpoint, create awareness of an issue, or something similar.)

  • technical difficulty (How technically challenging is the implementation?)

  • quality (including quality of appearance/graphics; functionality; correctness)

  • entertainment value (How much does your entry amuse us? For games, this may be called 'playability'. For simulations or other scenarios, this is 'interesting-ness')

• Submit early and often. There is value in submitting your scenario early, even before it is finished, and before the competition draws to an end. Any submitted scenario can be extended, updated, improved and re-submitted any number of times until the contest ends. Advantages of submitting work in progress are:

  • At the end of every week, a Most-interesting-new-submission prize is awarded. This prize goes to the submission that has made the most interesting new contribution in the past week. This may be a new submission, or a new feature in a previous submission. The Most-interesting-new-submission prize is a Greenfoot t-shirt. These prizes are awarded at the end of 1.Nov, 8.Nov, 15.Nov, 22.Nov, 29.Nov (midnight UK time - GMT).

  • Judges will give an ongoing 'Judges commentary' on the Greenfoot Gallery web site. In this commentary, they will remark on promising features, indicate what they like and what might be improved. Submitting early is a good chance to receive feedback for the purpose of improving the submission.

• Participants agree to publish the source code of their projects to the Greenfoot Gallery. At least the last submission of each project to the competition must include source code. Participants are welcome to publish the source code earlier in the contest if they choose to do so. If participants choose to publish source code early, other participants are allowed to make use of (parts of) the code, with proper attribution.

• Entry to the contest is free. Members of the Greenfoot team, their family and friends cannot enter. Participants agree to have their names, the names of their school (if the competiton entry was created as part of a school activity), and their photo published on the Greenfoot web site.

• Participants can enter multiple scenarios into the competition. However, one person can win at most one final prize. If multiple scenarios of the same person are in consideration for prizes, the highest scoring entry will be chosen, and other entries by the same person will be excluded from prizes.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Pearson Higher Education, who are generously supporting this competition.