Christian Köppe

A Pattern Language for Teaching Design Patterns

Pedagogical Patterns help in general with teaching. But the teaching of design patterns introduces a few specific problems like e.g. ensuring that the purpose of patterns is understood and that patterns are applied in the appropriate and correct way. This pattern language for teaching design patterns addresses these problems and offers solutions for teachers and trainers to solve them.

Continuous activity: a pedagogical pattern for active learning

Student assignments often last for a longer period and are conceived so that the students can finish them in this period. However, this requires that the students continuously work on them, but experience shows that this is not always the case. The pedagogical pattern Continuous Activity helps in ensuring that the students indeed are working on the assignment during the whole period and can finish them on time and with sufficient quality.

Lecture design patterns: laying the foundation

Lectures as method of instruction are conversely discussed in the literature, but despite all critics are lectures still widely used in academic institutions. The efficiency of these lectures is highly dependent on their design. Patterns can help with the design process, but even though quite a lot of educational design patterns have already been published, not many of them address the design of good lectures. All published lecture-relevant patterns focus on some specific aspects of lecture design, but what is missing are the underlying higher level aspects: the basics needed for laying the foundation of good lectures. In this paper we propose five fundamental lecture design patterns that address these higher level aspects: S<scp>uitable</scp> C<scp>ontent</scp> S<scp>election</scp>, S<scp>uitable</scp> D<scp>elivery</scp> F<scp>orm</scp> S<scp>election</scp>, R<scp>egular</scp> A<scp>ttention</scp> R<scp>ecuperation</scp>, L<scp>ecture</scp> S<scp>tructuring</scp>, and I<scp>magination</scp> S<scp>timulation</scp>.

A pattern language for teaching design patterns (part 1)

Pedagogical Patterns help in general with teaching. But the teaching of design patterns introduces a few specific problems like e.g. ensuring that the purpose of patterns is understood and that patterns are applied in the appropriate and correct way. This pattern language for teaching design patterns addresses these problems and offers solutions for teachers and trainers to solve them.n This part covers 5 patterns of the language in detail --- Holistic Pattern Understanding, Context, Problem and Consequences First, Experience of Problems, Simplicity Above Patterns, and Discover Your Own Pattern. The other 4 patterns are covered in part 2 of this work, to be published in the proceedings of the PLoP11 conference. These patterns are included here as patlets.

A pattern language for teaching in a foreign language: part 1

Mastering foreign languages increasingly becomes a required skill in many working fields. This often is incorporated in curricula by integrating content and language learning. This paper describes some difficulties of this integration in order to raise awareness about them and offers some patterns which support teachers who begin with integrating content and language. The patterns are: Input Selection, Lucky Language Clover, Metatalk, and Language Role Model.

Using pattern mining for competency-focused education

Educational Patterns aim at improving education in a practical and proven way, and are mainly applied for designing courses in a way that students can effectively acquire the courses content. But professional software engineers need more competencies than only mastering the technology, like analyzing problems and responding appropriately.n We show in this paper that the process of pattern mining can combine these two aspects and helps in integrating competencies in a curriculum. As additional result, learning patterns are documented which help beginning students with their learning process.

A pattern language for teaching design patterns (part 2)

Pedagogical Patterns help in general with teaching. But the teaching of design patterns introduces a few specific problems like e.g. ensuring that the purpose of patterns is understood and that patterns are applied in the appropriate and correct way. This pattern language for teaching design patterns addresses these problems and offers solutions for teachers and trainers to solve them.n This second part covers 4 patterns of the language in detail --- Best Fitting Pattern Choice, Experienced Advantage, Pattern Implementation Matters, and Principle-Supporting Pattern Usage --- and describes the changes made since the publication of part 1 of the language, published in the proceedings of the EuroPLoP 11 conference. The other patterns are included here as patlets.

Observations on the observer pattern

A group of students who should have been familiar with basic design principles and MVC all failed to implement the Observer design pattern correctly while at the same time violating several design principles. This paper discusses what went wrong and why it probably went wrong. Possible suggestions are given for teaching the Observer pattern and for teaching design patterns in general.

Patterns, computer science education, and the 20 th anniversary of pattern languages of programs (PLoP)

T he release in 1994 of Design Patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software [2], by the soon-to-be famous Gang of Four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides), dramatically changed how we look at software development. Today, knowledge of the 23 patterns collected in this book is regarded as basic knowledge necessary for any software developer. These patterns, and the general idea of software design patterns, are included in the Computer Science or Software Engineering curricula of many institutions today. The pattern community started before the publication of this specific book and consisted of more than just these four authors. It had come together as a larger group, the Hillside Group, in 1993 to explore the idea of patterns on the applicability for software design-a concept introduced by the architect Christopher Alexander and his colleagues, based on some groundwork from Erich Gamma. In 1994, the first PLoP conference was held as a new way of sharing the knowledge about patterns, and nearly 100 people participated. Among these were quite a few whose names are nowadays also closely associated with patterns or general software engineering-names like just to name a few. And since that very first PLoP conference, a large number of patterns and pattern languages have been collected, documented and shared with the world through the conference proceedings of what has become a conference series. Furthermore, many sister conferences were established, like the EuroPLoP (which started in 1995), Viking PLoP, Asian PLoP or more recently Guru PLoP (see [3] for more information). From the very beginning, PLoP participants started thinking about the possibility of applying the pattern idea to educational design. One of this first attempts was Patterns for Classroom Education by from Dana Anthony, published in the 2nd Proceeding of PLoP in 1995. A few years later the Peda The release of Design Patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, by the soon-to-be famous Gang of Four (Erich Gamma, 1994 dramatically changed how we look at software development.

Report of the CSER C'12 conference

A fter a successful first edition in 2011 (see the report by Henry Walker in SIGCSE Bulletin Vol. 43, nr 2), this year the second Computer Science Education Research Conference, CSERC ’12, was held on 10-11 September 2012 in Wroclaw, Poland. The conference was held in cooperation with ACM and was co-located with the FedCSIS 2012 conference. The conference started with a workshop on using visualization in university level computer science education. After that, the chairs, Gerrit van der Veer (Open Universiteit NL, also SIGCHI president) and Marcin Sikorski (Gdansk Technical University, Poland), opened the main part of the CSERC2012 conference. In the first keynote, Ingrid Russell (University of Hartford, US) gave an overview of her work on the usage of machine learning for improving student engagement and learning. Jerzy Nawrocki (Poznan University of Technology, Poland) proposed in the second keynote his manifesto on four key values of modern CS education.