Workshops -- Monday

The successful usage of object oriented technology requires a thorough understanding of basic OO concepts. It is during the introductory stage of learning where most of this "hard work" must be done. During this stage, examples and metaphors are powerful tools to abstract from technicalities and focus on the underlying fundamental ideas. We have not done our best job at this point. Many textbooks, courses, and teachers still use the same old examples (like ATMs, library systems, and the "hello world" program). But object technology has evolved; educators and students feel the need of better and more interesting examples. This workshop will be a starting point for further work into this direction. A lot of work has already been done in related areas. The Pedagogical Patterns community for example deals with general pedagogical ideas that can be adapted to concrete teaching situations. The Non-Software Examples of Software Design Patterns on the other hand present concrete metaphors to abstract from the technicalities of design patterns.

This workshop will bring together people from industry and academia to share experiences on the usage of concrete examples and metaphors to teach basic concepts of object technology. Participants will furthermore reflect upon the learning process to identify key requirements for the understanding of the basic concepts and propose feasible orderings of the teaching material.

The workshop participants will develop a clearly laid out and uniform presentation format for examples and metaphors. All examples, analogies and metaphors will be collected in an initial library and made available after the workshop.