A virtuous cycle for Programming Principles Su White and Teresa Binks, University of Southampton

What’s coming up? Intro and Background Inspirations and what we did with them Stats and Evaluation What the future holds Personal observations

Intro and Background We have been here before… Regular review/enhancement Constrained – had to keep structure and teaching practices – changed teaching content – ?? Student learning

People

Hello! Teresa Binks Computer Science 2 nd year (repeated my first year) My very first workshop! And I woke up with a frog in my throat and that is why I’m croaking today

Inspirations Maria Montessori Independence Self Correction Repetition Extension Real Life Head First Java Light Hearted Metaphors Visual Conversational BlueJ Manipulable Beginner Focused

What we changed In this lesson we will be studying…

What I did on my summer holidays By Teresa Binks

The Big Picture PrimitivesObjects defined in Javadefined in classes stored in variables directly references stored in variables Pass a copyPass a reference

Cups A variable is a space in memory that the computer uses to store a value It’s like a cup int myNumber; myNumber = 7; A primitive ‘fits into’ a cup myNumber int

The Big Picture PrimitivesObjects defined in Javadefined in classes stored in variables directly references stored in variables Pass a copyPass a reference

Objects and cups An object does not fit into a cup... Elephant nellie; nellie = new Elephant(); So what does Java do? nellie Elephant?!?! OO

Remote controls Java leaves the elephant object in memory somewhere... And references it – like using a remote control

Memory nellie Elephant Elephant nellie; nellie = new Elephant(); nellie.eat(); Eat Sleep Trumpet

Primitive types vs. object types 32 object type primitive type SomeObject obj; int i; Objects First with Java - A Practical Introduction using BlueJ, © David J. Barnes, Michael Kölling

Primitive types vs. object types 32 ObjectType a; int a; ObjectType b; 32 int b; b = a; Objects First with Java - A Practical Introduction using BlueJ, © David J. Barnes, Michael Kölling

Feedback The module was intellectually challenging and stimulating Overall, how would you rate this module?

What were the best features of this module? Interesting courseworks and assignments Space Cadets Lectures were very easy to follow and to understand Being able to practise the code presented in lectures within labs

Personnel Rikki Prince: Lead Demonstrator Lab mark schemes Wiki Self Streaming The wiki allowed us a dynamicism in the way we presented material to the students. Rather than relying on the busy course leaders to update the course page it could be done by the "teachers on the ground" (post grads) on the students themselves, allowing better personalisation. “The biggest issue of the course was our teaching of 'static', which I think was triggered by mentioning it as 'magic' at the beginning, but mostly caused by god- awful compiler error messages that say something like "cannot do this from a non-static context", so lots of people just ended up making their methods unnecessarily 'static'.” I think the use of The delaying of teaching objects for a few weeks also helped the students understand what could be done inside the objects, rather than expecting them to blindly believe!

Personnel Eric Cooke: Module Leader Lectures Labs Students enjoyed the presentations. The laughed at the funny parts and the fact that they were laughing means they were listening!

Personnel Teresa Binks: Precocious undergrad Lectures Labs Notes Programming doesn’t have to be traditional, boring and intimidating We don’t need to target stronger students in these lectures so long as there is something for them elsewhere

Thanks Any Questions?

Programming Principles