Subj : Re: Good examples of programming course lecture notes
To   : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer
From : jan V
Date : Sat Sep 03 2005 09:01 am

> I used to teach a tutorial at UBC, Fortran and assembler. I would
> freak out my students my telling them they were not allowed to take
> notes.  They had to GET what I was saying, not just write it down.
>
> No student ever failed.  I had THEM at the boards writing code most of
> the time. I could then easily tell if they were getting what I was
> teaching.  It was unconventional, but very popular.  I had all kinds
> of students transfer in.

My courses were chapter based, just like a book, and ended with exercises.
The culmination of the 5-day course, after seeing language fundamentals,
I/O, threading, very basic GUI and networking, was an exercise to create a
token-passing network with all the laptops or PCs in the room, and have each
node in the ring beep when receiving the token before passing it on to the
next node. This exercise forced people to cooperate, first in pairs, then in
threesomes, etc.. until finally, towards the end of the friday, the whole
class was buzzing with excitement and helping to debug the last student's
program which prevented the ring from being completed. The whole course has
heavily slide-oriented, but the effectiveness of the format was clearly
proven by the self-evident learning results obtained towards the end of each
week. The students were professionals though, and their employers paid lots
of money for these courses.

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