Teaching OO using Java

 
Teaching OO using Java
Calculational
logic
festive occasions
ABC book
CS Faculty over the years
CS@Cornell
The Triple-I Administration
How Bush Operated

 

 

I have been teaching OO, using Java, for 0ver 10 years now. My son (Paul Gries, University of Toronto) have developed a model of classes and objects that allow students to understand what objects are almost immediately, and my introductory course at Cornell, taken by 130-200 students each semester, teaches OO first. The students learn about assignment and expressions the first day. Then comes objects, class definitions, subclasses, inheritance, constructors, etc. before the students see the assignment statement. It works. ProgramLive is an introductory programming text, using Java, that speaks to you! For information on all of this, look at the following:

You can find powerpoint slides for all lectures, programming assignments, previous exams --everything
ProgramLive A CD with ~250 recorded lectures with synched animation, on OO programming
Our book Multimedia Introduction to Programming Using Java, writtne by David and Paul Gries. Comes with ProgramLive
OOPSLA 2008 (invited) "Teaching OO to beginners", at the education symposium. Available in oopsla.key (Apple keynote presentation, 7.9MB), oopsla.ppt (ppt conversion of oopsle.key, 1.6MB)
SIGCSE 2008 Principled approach to teaching OO first. Available in sigcse2008.key (Apple keynote presentation, 684KB), sigcse2008.ppt (ppt conversion of sigcse2008.key, 944KB)
PPPJ 2007 (Lisbon, keynote) Teaching object-oriented programming first (using Java). powerpoint    word doc    pdf file
Earlier paper on a model for OO in Java "Frames and Folders: a teachable memory model for Java". By Gries and Gries. First publised as a technical report around 2001. pdf file

 

ProgramLive is a livetext: a text that relies not only on the printed word but also on graphics, animation, audio, the computer, and the active participation of the "reader". ProgramLive has over 250 recorded lectures, most 3-5 minutes long, with synched animations that appear in a window on the computer monitor. Of course, one can see the text of each lecture as it is being spoken, and one can print the text.

ProgramLive was coauthored by David's, Paul Gries, a Lecturer at the University of Toronto. The livetext benefits from 30 years of research and education in programming methodology by David Gries --tempered and modernized by the more forward looking Paul Gries. It is written to teach OO early or late, depending on the instructor's desires.

Here's an indication of how ProgramLive is viewed by others. Metrowerks liked ProgramLive's tutorial on using CodeWarrior so much that the tutorial is now included in the CodeWarrior Learning Edition.

Click here for more info on ProgramLive.

Click here for a student website for ProgramLive.

 

Multimedia Introduction to Programming Using Java

was published in September 2004, by Springer Verlag. It is tightly connected with the CD ProgramLive, with frequent pointers to related lectures and Java programs on the CD.