Subj : Re: Good examples of programming course lecture notes
To   : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer
From : jg.campbell.ng
Date : Sat Sep 03 2005 04:49 am


clemenr@wmin.ac.uk wrote:
> Hi. I'm about to write some notes for a university level Java
> programming course, specialising in audio/midi applications.

I wouldn't mind speaking to you offline about that -- Java audio; it's
in  Java based games programming course I'm starting soon, and there
may be some incompatibilities between javax.sound and my intuition.

>
> I have quite a bit of experience in designing teaching materials for
> programming courses in Java and other languages. However, one thing
> that I've never really felt that I've optimised is the organisation of
> material on the slides (openoffice, similar to powerpoint) used during
> teaching.

I'd agree with most of what Roedy Green say.

I used to write a course 'textbook', e.g.

http://www.jgcampbell.com/oopcpp99/html/

which was prepared using LaTeX -- that a HTML version from LaTeX2HTML.
As you can see there is a good deal of code, and most time was spent
walking through the code.

The students received a hard copy of the document (12pt); the document
was printed on acetates (yes, 12pt only!) and those used for the
lectures and tutorials and practicals. Each week (not exactly aligned
with chapters) had a set of practical exercises based on the text.

No student, even in anonymous questionnaires, ever complained about the
use of the small print on slides. However, as I was leaving the
institution in 1999, the 'quality' czars were closing in on me and
demanding PowerPoint (yes, they specified the brand) and colour.

Previous experience -- in handwritten slide days -- indicated that
students became confused if there was a course 'text' /and/ slides;
which took precendence? Especially when the lecturer wrote amost the
same again on the slide during the lecture.

Recently, on more descripive courses, I have come back to 'text' plus
slides; but that was after presenting the courses for many years and I
knew /exactly/ what to put on the slides. Also, lectures from slides
are easy for the lecturer and entertaining for students. But do they
learn more? I think less. Or do they get confused when it comes to
exams by having two documents? I have reason to believe that they do.
The level at which I was teaching meant that the bullet points were
plenty to to well in the exams.

To make the slides, I used LaTeX again; normal document, 12pt, and
LARGE font size specifier.

I have always used acetates because I never trusted computer systems
people to provide functional computers + data projectors.

But this year, because of the games course, I'm going to buy my own
data projector and use it with my own laptop. But I agree with other
posters, dim the lights and the audience goes into sleep mode. Same, I
think, was really slick PowerPoint slide shows.

>
> I'd like to ask if anyone knows of some programming course they've
> taken or are taking where the use of slides/powerpoint was really
> effective. It doesn't need to be a Java course as I'm interested in
> lookng more at presentation and lecture design styles rather than
> content? I've done a lot of searching on the net, but haven't found
> anything that I feel is clearly better than what I do now.

Would PowerPoint (or OpenOffice equivalent) allow you to include
significant chunks of code? At 12pt you can get about 60 lines of code
on a page (portrait mode); you need that for many applications. And
even at that, you have to compromise on white space and comments.
>
> Any recommendations? Either online notes, or if the notes are not
> publically available, could any readers of this please tell me the
> lecturer/prof's name, university, and the name of the course and I can
> ask for a sample lecture directly.  Or, if other teachers are reading
> this, I'd like to hear what they do.
>

Yes, there are some fine examples on the web. Later I'll attempt to
collect a few links and post them here. However, from the web, we would
have no idea how the materials are used and presented and what the
total experience is.


> Note: I'm aware of arguments that traditional lectures are not
> necessarily the only nor best way of teaching programming, but for the
> meantime at least, I have to work in a particular environment that
> expects reasonably traditional lectures to occur along with practical
> laboratories.
>

I think it is important that the 'notes' (whatever form) are in harmony
with the practical exercises. OTOH, I have only rarely encountered
students who understood how to use this mode correctly -- i.e. go to
the pages in the notes where the concept (in the exercise) was
introduced; review that and the code example. Then attempt the
exercise.

But Westminster is a former (U.K.) polytechnic? Presumably you will
have some 'quality' police there that will have a fixed idea on a
lecturing 'standard' (for all subjects)? I.e. assholes who were no good
at anything and found themselves an easy route up the greasy pole?

Best regards,

Jon C.

.