Documentation (was Re: Smalltalk & Squeak featured on Slashdot)

Mark Guzdial guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Thu Apr 19 13:25:55 UTC 2001


>
>By the way, adding better documentation (with examples) to the system
>might make excellent class projects at GATech by the way... If I still
>taught programming these days I'd try to make as many exercises as
>possible be a contribution (no matter how minor) to some open source
>effort (even if the students decide not to contribute it after it was
>done) as a way to learn by doing and show them the larger context of
>their programming efforts. How about telling that student he or she will
>get an A in the class if she or he writes good documentation to some
>number of classes or methods found confusing? Just think what 240
>students working together could add in just one week near the end of the
>semester!
>
>-Paul Fernhout
>Kurtz-Fernhout Software

We do this, in a sense.  Visit 
http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/cs2340/Cases  -- there are over 100 
well-documented projects here for future students to use as examples. 
Students get extra credit for doing this.  Several of these ARE 
tutorials and other forms of documentation.

When you look over these, you'll also see that the MP3/MIDI player is 
*NOT* the hardest project we've given students in this class.  A year 
ago, students built personal newspapers that scoured a dozen websites 
to create HTML and PostScript personalized newspapers, with pictures. 
It's not the COMPLEXITY of the project that students are grousing 
about (well, it is :-) -- we should've waited a term until the MP3 
plugin was better shaken-out.

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html





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