OOPSLA '96 Educators' Symposium Program

Monday, October 7, 1996

Chair: Mahesh H. Dodani, Object Technology University, IBM

The Educators Symposium presents a unique forum for professionals who have a vested interest in OO education and training. This year, the Symposium features an exciting mix of featured talks from speakers on the cutting edge of OO education and training, paper presentations on OO education in academia and new approaches to OO education and training, summaries of workshops addressing innovations in OO education and training, and a panel of distinguished guests addressing the challenges of OO education and training in the 21st century.

Program Information

1. Featured Speakers
2. Papers
3. Workshop Reports
4. Panel Session

1. Featured Speakers

The Educators' Symposium will feature two prominent speakers in OO education and training:

John Pugh, The Object People and Carleton University

Confessions of an OO Educator: Academic and Industrial Experiences Over the past decade, John has been involved in the mainstreaming of object technology into the computer science curriculum at Carleton University as well as developing and delivering education and training programs for large organizations transitioning into objects.
In this talk, he will describe his successes and failures, some painful lessons learned, a few pitfalls to avoid, and provide pointers for success to the academic and industrial communities.

Bruce Anderson, Object Technology Practice, IBM

Reflective Learning: Empowering the OO Practicioner During 20 years of teaching Bruce has developed a style that is effective in both University and Industrial settings. It can be used to learn new things or to improve competence in current activities. The key features are firstly genuine engagement with the material and with other people, and secondly reflection on the results and the process.

2. Papers

Using OO as a Common Basis for System Development Education.
J. L. Knudsen and O. L. Madsen (Aarhus University)

Object-orientation has a long tradition at the Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, starting with Simula in the early seventies. For more than 20 years there have been courses in OO programming, including BETA, Smalltalk, Self and others. Recently object-orientation has started to be integrated in other parts of the curriculum such as in software engineering, distributed systems and databases. In this paper we report on this approach to teaching object-orienteation. One of the advantages of object-orientation is that it provides an integrating perspective on the various areas to be taught. Besides providing a common conceptual framework, it is also possible to use common languages and tools and this have a profound influence on the integration.

The Impact of OO Technology on the Computer Science Curriculum.
P. Kelly and D. L. Smith (Ballarat University).

With current industry emphasis on OO technology for software development, staff members from the School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Ballarat, Australia, recognized the need for a pedagogic change to its curriculum. In 1994 the staff adopted OO technology as the underlying focus for its curriculum and research. The first in a series of curriculum changes was implemented in the first semester of 1995, by introducing OO programming as the first programming paradigm for the School's computer science students. This paper describes the manner in which the School implemented the change and outlines the predicted changes to the School's curriculum over the next two years.

Teaching Object Technology: A Breadth-first vs. a Depth-first Approach.
M. L. Manns (University of North Carolina at Asheville) and J. McKim (Hartford Graduate Center).

Strategies for teaching object technology (OT) are presented regularly at OOPSLA and other conferences. As educators attempt to mold their course work, the discussion and debate over the most effective way to teach OT continues. It is unlikely that a consensus will ever be reached among these educators because no one approach can meet the needs of every institution. This paper presents two different approaches to teaching OT which have worked well in the environment where each is used. The first, a breadth-first course, covers a variety of OT topics, while the second, a depth-first course, concentrates on developing a system with the Eiffel programming language. Each of these courses is described and a case is made by the instructors, for the advantages and limitations of each approach.

Tools, Heuristics, and Techniques to Assist OO Education.
C. Gibbon (University of Nottingham) and G. Lovegrove (Staffordshire University).

Methods for object oriented analysis and design have existed for roughly a decade. Our observations are that undergraduates are finding certain parts of the process of learning a method difficult. There is a need to supplement the method to assist the learning process. This work describes some simple techniques to help students find good objects and also describes the design of a tool to assist in forming good designs using heuristics.

An Application Centered Approach to Instruction.
B. Malloy, J. McGregor, and D. Gupta (Clemson University).

Current approaches to course instruction are typically topic centered, where the major focus of the course is a sub-discipline of computer science such as data structures or algorithms. In this paper, we propose an alternative to the topic centered approach, an application centered approach to instruction, where the organizing theme of the course is an application area such as editors, data base management systems, simulation, graphics, or numerical computing. The object-oriented approach to software development is particularly suited to the application centered approach to instruction. The emphasis of most object-oriented development methods on models of domain concepts supports the exposition of the chosen application. The support provided by object-oriented design techniques and object-oriented language constructs facilitates the pedagogy of incremenatlly developing the project over the semester.

3. Workshop Reports

OOPSLA'96 encouraged workshops on OO education and training. As a result of the call for participation, two workshops specifically focused on OO education and training were accepted. The organizers of these workshops will present a short summary of the results of the workshop.

4. Panel Session

Preparing for OO Education and Training in the 21st Century

Moderator
Linda Northrop, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Panelists

Desmond D'Souza	ICON Computing
Brian Henderson-Sellers	Swinburn University
Mary Lynn Manns	University of North Carolina, Asheville
John Pugh	The Object People & Carleton University
Richard Wiener	University of Colorado, Colorado Springs