Re: Teaching Java, teaching what?
On 12/10/2013 9:22 AM, Arved Sandstrom wrote:
On 12/09/2013 09:11 PM, Arne Vajh?j wrote:
On 12/9/2013 11:02 AM, Arved Sandstrom wrote:
But I'm not convinced you can accomplish more by doing "first
steps with Swing". The issue here may be that 30 hours isn't
enough...
If kept simple with JLabel, JTextField, JButton etc. I think they
can make something work *and* understand what they are doing.
I'm not being combative here, but in the big scheme of things, that
knowledge will help the students how exactly?
Writing some code and being able to see it work without it appearing
to be black magic is learning to program.
Apart from the top
students, who will probably get on with any approach to OOP, everyone
else - at best - will understand how to write simple Swing apps: some
will eventually (after further study) grasp the larger principles, but
many will not.
You want to show something that is OO.
You need input and output preferably something that looks
pre-1990.
Swing delivers both.
but I myself have a gut feeling that you'd do better with a
servlet approach.
I am not sold on that.
For what it's worth, I'm not sold on it either. To phrase things
differently, *if* you had enough time to do a decent intro to core Java
+ enough time to introduce either Swing or servlets, I'd prefer
servlets. I just don't think 30 hours is enough to do either.
Servlets would be more useful job wise.
But you would need more time to teach servlets than to teach Swing.
Server, HTML and other useful topics that in this context just
distracts from the topic.
For a barebones first approach, I think we can over-emphasize the
importance of GUIs (web or desktop) as being what beginners expect to
see, or what they feel comfortable with. I'm probably dating myself
here, but back in the '70's when I learned programming with FORTRAN 66
and FORTRAN 77, I (and most of my peers) grokked program output to
printer or tape, and program input from similar sources. It's also not
difficult to relate a console input prompt to an HTML text input box -
students understand that what matters is what you do with the input, not
so much how you got it.
Let me put something else out there. 30 hours is a short semester if we
suppose three 1-hour classes per week. Is it even realistic to try and
introduce any kind of GUI (Swing, JavaFX, servlets with simple HTML etc)
in 30 hours? Perhaps console output is all you should shoot for.
Console apps would certainly be better in the sense that there are even
less context to learn.
The problem here is probably more in the area of motivation. A console
app does not look fancy and that could be demotivating.
Arne
I think this is where the teacher needs to step up and be on their game.
If I were teaching a genuine intro class where practically everyone was
a novice [1], and let's assume it was 30 hours over a semester, and the
working language was Java, I think I'd spend the first 2 or 3 hours
providing context, without diving into code. Pseudocode maybe, on a
chalkboard or whiteboard, but no actual code for the first few sessions.
Part of what you'd cover is a basic discussion of I/O - how do you talk
to a program. Properly done, I think most students would get that I/O
to/from a console, or to/from a file, is just as much first class as I/O
through a GUI. And I think many would then understand that the true
program lies behind the interface.
You and I may find a console intuitive.
But that is not what is common today.
As an example look at the signing thread. The OP had found a nice
guy telling what command to use. But the explanation could just as
well had been written in Chinese - the OP was not thinking that way
at all. And he is not alone. It may be unfortunately that the socalled
digital generation in many ways know less about computers than the
previous generation, but that is how it is.
Arne