Hi goran,

I'm interested in your course! And I think that I'm not the only one.
We had last ESUG conference an Educator Symposium and there were many
people wondering what is the best way to teach OO and Smalltalk. We
were also looking for good examples. So, this dicussion and your
course are exactly within the interest of many Smalltalkers.

Stephan setup a swiki for collecting testomonies, courses and good
examples.
Would you like add you experiments and if possible the slides of your
course and exercises to the swiki :
http://scgwiki.iam.unibe.ch:8080/SmalltalkWiki/174.

Regards,
Noury


goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote :
> 
> [...]
> 
> Interesting topic. I used (couple of years ago) to teach "OO in
> practice" - a followup 2-day course to a basic 2-day OO course for
> professional developers. We argued that all these short courses tend to
> use "silly" code - very small examples that can't begin to show the
> advantages of OO. So I developed a domain implementation of a library
> with Books, Magazines, Customers etc. I also built a UI on top of it for
> students to play with but that is beside the point.
> 
> The course was planned like this:
> 
> Day one before lunch: Teach Smalltalk in 3 hours. Simple syntax,
> messages, browser, debugger. Small exercises.
> Day one after lunch: Explain the library code. Object models. Small
> exercises - creating the model, populating it a bit, digging around with
> inspectors etc. Seeing the model "for real".
> 
> Day two before lunch: Point out missing functionality - a complete class
> missing - Loan. Discuss how it should be implemented. Use the existing
> code as hints for what protocol it should provide. Focus on
> encapsulation, protocols etc. Students start planning on paper.
> 
> Day two after lunch: Agree in a groupdiscussion together on one
> implementation. Let the students implement it (in groups of 2). When the
> testcode runs correctly they are free to go home! :-)
> 
> I taught this course about 8-10 times and it worked very well. At one
> point a *very* capable teacher tried remaking it using Java but gave up
> - there was no way to be able to teach enough Java in 3 hours etc. Java
> has too much stuff that must be explained - students don't like to be
> told "Never mind those funny characters - they should just be there...".
> :-)
> 
> Almost all students loved the course and thought it really showed how an
> OO system works. It also made the theoretic concepts become tangible and
> understandable.
> 
> Anyway, I am not sure why I am writing about this - I just wanted to
> show that I understand what you are saying. :-)
> 
> regards, Göran

-- 
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Dr. Noury Bouraqadi
Ecole des Mines de Douai - Dept. G.I.P
http://csl.ensm-douai.fr/noury
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