Carl Alphonce

Benefits of using socially-relevant projects in computer science and engineering education

In an attempt to bridge a local technology gap, potentially provide software to health care organizations serving the needs of handicapped clients in the Western NY area, and provide innovative and interesting projects for our capstone design classes, the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) began soliciting projects from local organizations in need. The projects have been integrated into required senior-level undergraduate courses. The practical benefits of project experience on student education, and the benefits of providing useful software to the target organizations, were anticipated, but the experiences have proven to be much more. Students have responded with intensity and philanthropy. The clients have participated in the classroom experience as both recipients and teachers. The program has rescued students at academic risk, and the school is enjoying an enhanced reputation in the community. This paper explores positive and cautionary issues regarding the effort.

Using graphics to support the teaching of fundamental object-oriented principles in CS1

Teaching object-oriented programming in CS1 is hard. Keeping the attention of CS1 students is perhaps even harder. In our experience the former can be done successfully with very satisfying results by focusing on the fundamental principles of object-orientation, such as inheritance, polymorphism and encapsulation. The latter can be done by having students create graphical event-driven programs. Care must be taken, however, since teaching graphics can easily distract students and certainly takes time away from the fundamentals being taught. We use Java as a vehicle for OO instruction, but rather than expose CS1 students to the intricacies of Swing we employ an elegant and small graphics package called NGP. NGP allows students to create event-driven graphical programs using only inheritance and method overriding. We describe how we use NGP to enhance rather than detract from our teaching of fundamental OO principles.

QuickUML: a tool to support iterative design and code development

We demonstrate QuickUML, a tool which supports iterative design and code development by providing facilities to draw UML class diagrams, to generate Java code from such diagrams, and also to automatically generate a UML class diagram from a collection of Java source code files. We also discuss how use of the tool provides general support for teaching students the importance of design in software development.

Green: a customizable UML class diagram plug-in for eclipse

This poster presents a customizable round-tripping UML class diagram plug-in for Eclipse called Green. While this tool was developed primarily with students and instructors in introductory OO computer science courses in mind, its extensible architecture makes it potentially useful to others.Green is a flexible tool: each binary class relationship is implemented as a separate plug-in to the basic tool. The set of relationships supported is therefore easily tailored to the needs of the user. More importantly, the semantics of the relationships can be defined to suit the user. The tool can therefore adapt to the needs of its users.

Green: a pedagogically customizable round-tripping UML class diagram Eclipse plug-in

UML class diagrams are used quite commonly in CS1-CS2 courses and textbooks. The benefits of using these diagrams include providing a programming-language independent way of communicating program design, in an industry standard language. While drawing diagrams by hand is in itself useful, beginning students do not always perceive the benefit of designing before coding, and create these diagrams only if they have to, and then only as an afterthought.We have found that students are much more receptive to using UML class diagrams as an integral part of their development if they see immediate benefits from doing so. This paper describes Green, a simple to use yet flexible and extensible UML class diagramming tool. Green (an Eclipse plug-in) provides complete round-tripping between code and class diagram. This capability makes it easy for students to alternate between a detailed code-level view and a more abstract design view of their projects. With this capability students see creating class diagrams not as a separate and tedious activity, but as an easy way to turn designs into code and to discover the design of existing code.Greens distinguishing features when compared to similar tools are that it has been developed to meet the needs of CS1-CS2 students, the semantics of its relationships are customizable, additional class relationships can be defined and it is integrated with Eclipse, a mature development environment.

Nifty objects for CS0 and CS1

Joe Hummel Lake Forest College Dept of Math and CS, USA hummel@lakeforest.edu Carl Alphonce University of Buffalo Dept of CS and Engineering, USA alphonce@cse.Buffalo.edu Joe Bergin Pace University Dept of Computer Science, USA jbergin@pace.edu Michael Caspersen University of Aarhus Dept of Computer Science – Daimi, DK mec@daimi.au.dk Stuart Hansen University of Wisconsin – Parkside Dept of Computer Science, USA hansen@cs.uwp.edu James Heliotis Rochester Institute of Technology Dept of Computer Science, USA jeh@cs.rit.edu

Worked examples for sound object-oriented pedagogy: a "killer" workshop

The Killer Examples workshops are highly interactive workshops, held annually at OOPSLA since 2002. The workshop goals are to bring together educators and developers to share their object-oriented expertise, and provide a forum for discussion of teaching techniques and pedagogical goals. The theme of last years workshop was process in the pedagogy of object orientation; the theme of this years workshop is pedagogically sound examples for object orientation: examples which are structured to support student learning. The workshop solicits examples which can be used in the teaching of object orientation. Submitters present their examples at the workshop; participants in the workshop will critique the examples and actively engage in refining the examples in a way that they support a clear and sound pedagogy. The workshop accepts walk-ins if space permits and walk-ins are determined to have adequate interest and background in the workshop theme to contribute positively to the discussions.

Using reflection to enhance feedback for automated grading (abstract only)

Feedback serves a critical role in the learning process. For formative assessment to be effective in supporting a students learning, feedback must be provided in a timely fashion (so a student can derive benefit while engaging in the learning activity), it must be consistent across multiple submissions of the same student as well as across submissions by different students, and it must be of high quality (i.e. it must give students guidance as to how to improve their submission). In this poster we present a small library of Java classes which aid the writing automated tests for assessing the design of student programming exercises. Through its use of reflection we can allow more free-form assignments, and can provide feedback on both program functionality and design.

Green: a flexible UML class diagramming tool for eclipse

This poster presents continuing work on Green UML. Green is a UML class diagram plug-in for the Eclipse IDE developed originally for educational purposes. Due to this nature of the tool, its prominent features include live round-tripping and a customizable set of relationships. As a plug-in to Eclipse, Green is able to utilize the development environment and maintain a real-time synchronization between its class diagrams and the Java source code. The extensible style of Eclipse plug-ins also allows Green to have its own plug-ins, which in turn are the relationship semantics. By allowing end users to create, add, and remove relationships which are recognized by Green, the too becomes highly flexible and easily tailors to a users specific needs.

Teaching using off-the shelf on-line materials

The use of off-the-shelf on-line materials presents several challenges. In this session panelists report on their experiences in evaluating, installing and using such materials. Both positive and negative aspects of such use are discussed. The aim of the session is to provide useful information to those considering using (and those already using) on-line materials in their teaching. The session presents information in three mini-presentations, followed by a general discussion session.