Teaching Novices Programming and Important Applications in a Single Semester - Critical Factors from
Zero to Portable GUI Programming in Four Hours
Workshop (four hours) by Prof. Rony G. Flatscher
Over the past 35 years, systematic participant observation has been used to
evolve a course that enables novices to learn programming from zero. This course empowers them to
apply their knowledge to program for instance MS Office and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, create
client-server socket programs and create portable GUI programs, all in a single semester (four
months, four contact hours per week). Despite the course load of 8 ECTS (200 hours), there are no
dropouts among the participating business informatics students.
In this workshop, the developed pedagogical concept, the usable infrastructures, the curriculum and
the decisive parts for the overall success of this course will be presented. A few small, nutshell
examples are presented to illustrate what can be achieved. The workshop should allow each attendee
to analytically assess the overall concept, building blocks and applicability of the learning
outcome for students. By the end of the course, novices will be able to create programs that
control Windows programs via OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), use curl to interact with web
resources, create portable client-server socket programs, process XML and HTML5 text, and even
create portable, complex GUIs using the powerful JavaFX framework.
After attending this workshop, participants should be able to use the result of 35 years of
development of this dropout-free lecture for their purposes, for example for bridge courses or for
integration into their curriculum. In the spirit of open education, all learning materials (slides,
nutshell examples) are made freely available so that any interested lecturer can immediately offer
this course or adapt it for their own teaching.
Workshop Content
The workshop takes four hours including short breaks.
Part 1: Overview
- Course Objectives (object-oriented programming, addressing Windows and MS Office, creating portable GUIs, Internet/Sockets, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, ...)
- Course Structure (number of installments, teaching load, organization, ...)
- Other Factors (programming language, Pareto principle, pair-programming, ...)
Part 2: Syllabus
- "Business Programming 1 (BP1)": Programming Concepts (with Rexx and ooRexx)
- "Business Programming 2 (BP2)": Java Bridge for portable GUIs and more (BSF4ooRexx)
Part 3: Critical Installments
- Overview of freely available slides for adaptation
- Identifying critical installments within slides
- Onboarding (first installment)
- Messaging and Object-Orientation (third installment)
- COM/OLE for Windows Applications (fifth installment)
- Java and BSF4ooRexx (eight installment)
Part 4: Software and "hands-on" (Bring Your Laptop)
- Installation of the needed free and open-source software (multiplatform)
- Installation of IntelliJ (Community or Ultimate) as a development environment
- Running nutshell examples from critical installments (third, fifth, eight)
Prof. Rony G. Flatscher has been successful in teaching introductory courses to
programming to interested business administration students in a four hour lecture in a single
semester (four months) from zero to portable GUI programming.
The teaching concepts (organisation,
slides, nutshell examples, software infrastructure, toolings) have been developed over 35 years,
constantly systematically observing and
analyzing four courses per year where the students served for experiments when changing
teaching concepts. This allowed for constantly improving the lecture and materials over the years
such that it has become possible to reliably teach successfully programming this lecture.
This workshop will allow the attendees to learn the teaching concepts such that
they can assess them, apply them immediately (including the slides, see link section
below) and directly for their own successful teaching of such introductory classes.
Links:
- Conference workshop related links
- 36th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE2024) Homepage
- https://conf.researchr.org/home/cseet-2024
- CSEE&T 2024 Workshops Homepage CFP
- https://conf.researchr.org/track/cseet-2024/cseet-2024-workshops
- Related article links
- Flatscher, R. G., & Müller, G. (2021). "Business Programming" – Critical Factors from Zero to Portable GUI
Programming in Four Hours. In Marko Kolakovic, Tin Horvatinovic, Ivan Turcic (Ed.), 6th Business and
Entrepreneurial Economics 2021 - Conference Proceedings (pp. 76-82)
- "Business Programming" – Critical Factors from Zero to Portable GUI Programming in Four Hours
- Flatscher, R. G. (2023). Proposing ooRexx and BSF4ooRexx for Teaching Programming and Fundamental
Programming Concepts. In 2023 Program Guide ISECON: Information Systems Education Conference (pp. 89-102)
- Proposing ooRexx and BSF4ooRexx for Teaching Programming and Fundamental
Programming Concepts
- Winkler, T., & Flatscher, R. G. (2023). Cognitive Load in Programming Education: Easing the Burden
on Beginners with REXX. in Central European Conference on Information and Intelligent Systems (S. 171-178).
Faculty of Organization and Informatics.
-
Cognitive Load in Programming Education: Easing the Burden
on Beginners with REXX.
- Flatscher, R. G., & Winkler, T. (2024).
Concepts that Allow Learning the Programming Language Rexx Much Faster than
Other Languages.
Accepted paper for MIPRO 2024, 47th Convention, engineering education track.
-
- Flatscher, R. G., & Winkler, T. (2024).
Employing the Message Paradigm to Ease Learning Object-oriented Concepts
and Programming.
Accepted paper for MIPRO 2024, 47th Convention, engineering education track.
-
- Slides and additional information links
- Flatscher, R. G. (2024). Slides for "Business Programming", Part 1 (first half of semester/two months, from zero programming to Windows, MS Office or OpenOffice/LibreOffice programming)
- https://wi.wu.ac.at/rgf/wu/lehre/autowin/material/foils/
- Flatscher, R. G. (2024) Slides for "Business Programming", Part 2 (second half of semester/two months, BSF4ooRexx camouflaging Java as ooRexx allows for exploiting all Java class libraries)
- https://wi.wu.ac.at/rgf/wu/lehre/autojava/material/foils/
- University link to this workshop definition.
- workshop-business-programming-critical-factors-from-zero-to-portable-programming
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