CSEE&T 2024

Teaching Novices Programming and Important Applications in a Single Semester - Critical Factors from Zero to Portable GUI Programming in Four Hours

Workshop 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 slides: 20240729_TeachNovices-Workshop_Flatscher.pdf
Workshop software package (net-oo-rexx): https://wi.wu.ac.at/rgf/rexx/tmp/net-oo-rexx-packages/

Workshop Content

Part 1: Overview

Part 2: Syllabus

Part 3: Critical Installments

Part 4: Software and "hands-on" (Bring Your Laptop)

Note there will be USB sticks provided that include the slides, the nutshell examples, the portable versions of the infrastructure (ooRexx, BSF4ooRexx850, Java) for Linux, macOS and Windows, and in addition the installation packages of ooRexx, BSF4ooRexx850 for Linux, macOS and Windows.

 

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:

Imprint/Impressum

Last updated: 2024-07-25