Subj : Re: Good examples of programming course lecture notes
To   : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer
From : Arthur J. O'Dwyer
Date : Sat Sep 03 2005 01:47 pm


On Fri, 2 Sep 2005 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'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.

   CMU's 15-411 Compiler Design course used good slides last year.
(Unfortunately, a cursory Google search didn't turn up any examples.)
Of course, compiler design is well suited to slides, since for example
explaining code generation involves a lot of impenetrable assembly code 
organized in blocks with arrows showing control flow --- easy to show with 
Powerpoint, hard to show on the blackboard. I'm not sure any lessons will
really be applicable to teaching Java, though.

   Anyway, the person who said that the primary use of Powerpoint slides is 
to print out and use as a summary of the lecture was right. If you're 
making a presentation, you want the slides to complement what you're 
saying and reinforce your message visually; but if you're doing a lecture, 
the slides are more like pre-generated lecture notes, and it's more 
important that they make sense on their own a week after the lecture.

   In Fall 2004, the principal lecturer for 15-411 was Peter Lee.

HTH,
-Arthur

.