1 / 27

Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students’ Opinions

Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students’ Opinions. Mirjana Ivanović, Dejan Mitrović, Miloš Radovanović Department of Mathematics and Informatics Faculty of Sciences University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Agenda. Introduction The topics Assignments and grading Students’ opinions

mckenzie-davenport
Download Presentation

Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students’ Opinions

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students’ Opinions Mirjana Ivanović, Dejan Mitrović, Miloš Radovanović Department of Mathematics and Informatics Faculty of Sciences University of Novi Sad, Serbia

  2. Agenda • Introduction • The topics • Assignments and grading • Students’ opinions • Discussions Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  3. Introduction • Object-oriented programming I: existing, mandatory course for all CS students, 3rd semester • Covers OO concepts, the Java language, some Java SE libraries • Object-oriented programming II: elective course, 4th semester • OOP II is the continuation OOP I, with the focus on advanced Java topics • The main goal was to teach the students practical Java skills required by the industry Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  4. Agenda • Introduction • The topics • Assignments and grading • Students’ opinions • Discussions Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  5. The interdependency of topics New Java 5 lang. features Enumerations Generics JFC/Swing Strings Collections OO design I/O system Network programming Distributed programming Threads Java EE Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  6. Topic details (1/5) • New Java 5 language features • Enumerated types. Generics. Autoboxing/Unboxing. Varargs. Enhanced for loop. Static imports. Annotations. Covariant return types. • Strings in Java • Methods of the String class. Immutability and performance. StringBuilder. Formatting strings. Regular expressions. • Java enumerated types • Motivation. Writing and using enumerated types. Enumerations as classes – properties and methods. Inheritance. Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  7. Topic details (2/5) • Generic types in Java • Motivation. Basic usage. Sub-typing. Generic wildcards. Raw type and legacy code. • Java collections framework • Overview of the JCF. Core collection interfaces. Collection implementations. Element ordering. Comparator and Comparable interfaces. Collection algorithms. • Java threading features • Concepts of concurrency. Thread context switch. Synchronization techniques – synchronized methods and statements, locks. Concurrent collections. Timers. The liveness property. Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  8. Topic details (3/5) • Creating GUI with JFC/Swing • Overview of the concepts comprising Java-based GUI applications. Top-level containers. Layout managers. Event-driven programming. Overview of basic Swing components – buttons, labels, etc. Detailed insight into advanced Swing components – lists, tables, and trees. • Customizing JFC/Swing-based GUI • Working with panes of top-level containers. Writing custom layout managers. Component development. Java 2D. Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  9. Topic details (4/5) • The Java I/O system • Stream basics. I/O streams. Byte streams. Character streams. The Decorator design pattern. Buffered streams. Useful I/O classes – File, PrintWriter, and Scanner. NIO. • Java network programming • Networking basics. Network addressing in Java. Uniform Resource Identifiers. TCP sockets. UDP datagrams. Multiplexing. • Distributed programming with Java • Distributed software architectures. CORBA. RMI. Serialization. Reflection API. Classloaders. Case-study – mobile agents. Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  10. Topic details (5/5) • Java EE pt. 1 • Multi-tier software architectures. Overview of the Java technology. Introduction to Java EE. Java Persistence API. Enterprise JavaBeans. • Java EE pt. 2 • Service-Oriented Architectures and web services. Java Server Faces. • Object-oriented design • UML. Design patterns. Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  11. Agenda • Introduction • The topics • Assignments and grading • Students’ opinions • Discussions Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  12. Assignments and grading • A student could score the maximum of 100 points, attained from: • Practical assignments: 32 points • Theoretical tests: 28 points • The final exam: 40 points • In order to qualify for the final exam, a student needed to attain: • Min. 16 points (50%) from practical assignments • Min. 14 points (50%) from theoretical tests • The passing grade was 55 Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  13. Practical assignments • There were 12 practical assignments in total: 5 individual and 7 group • Individual assignments covered the following topics: • Strings in Java (1 point) • Enumerated types (1 point) • Generic types in Java (2 points) • Java collections framework (2 points) • Java threading features (2 points) • Individual assignments were conducted in a computer laboratory, each within a 90 minute timeframe Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  14. Group assignments • For the remaining 7 practical assignments, students were divided into groups of 3 or 4 • In order to qualify for group assignments, a student had to attain at least 4 points (50%) from individual assignments • Group assignments covered all the remaining topics, except for the Java I/O system, totaling 24 points • Each group was given the same task description and had to submit the solution within 1 week Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  15. Grading group assignments • Students had to defend submitted solutions, through individual discussions • The total number of points given to a student for each assignment was based on several criteria: • The overall percentage of the problem that had been solved • The amount of work completed by each student • The level of understanding the student had for his/hers own code • The level of understanding the student had for the code programmed by his/hers coworkers • The student’s comprehension of the underlying theory Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  16. Grades • Initially, 53 students enrolled the course • 28 students (58%) passed individual assignments • 22 students qualified for the final exam • 42% of the initial number • 79% of those who had passed individual assignments • As of June 2011, 13 students passed the final exam: • 6: 15% • 7: 32% • 8: 23% • 9: 15% • 10: 15% Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  17. Agenda • Introduction • The topics • Assignments and grading • Students’ opinions • Discussions Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  18. Students’ opinions – on topics (1/2) • How would you describe the difficulty of topics? • How satisfied were you with the course topics? Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  19. Students’ opinions – on topics (2/2) • Do you consider the course topics to be valuable for your future profession? Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  20. How would you describe the difficulty of group assignments? Would you rather work on the problems individually, in the computer laboratory? Students’ opinions – on group assignments Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  21. Overall positive impressions • “I believe that this course, without superlatives and exaggerations, is one of the most useful courses in our entire education.” • “Only for ambitious programmers, difficult, but very useful. The best course up to this point.” (2nd year student) • “I think we’ve learned a lot of useful stuff that we will be able to employ in the future. The set of chosen topics is phenomenal, difficult, but phenomenal.” Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  22. Overall negative impressions • The number one negative impression: too many assessments of the theoretical knowledge • Also, no chances for improving the score • Poor reactions to the UML and Design patterns topic • “A lot of new, strange, and difficult topics covered very fast. We were expected to do a lot of stuff on our own, which we were not used to.” • “Way too much work for an elective course.” Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  23. Agenda • Introduction • The topics • Assignments and grading • Students’ opinions • Discussions Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  24. Discussions on group assignments • Mixed impressions with group assignments • Students were (surprisingly) very honest about the amount of work they have (not) completed • However, in many cases they were not able to divide the work equally • Irresponsible behavior of some students towards other members of their group • Overall, grading group assignments correctly was a difficult task Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  25. Problems with Java EE • A large portion of students were simply not able to setup GlassFish with Eclipse on their home computers • Students had many small problems while working on the Java EE assignments, but from which they were not able to recover on their own • So there were a lot of e-mails exchanged back and forth • A lot of reading of GlassFish-generated exception stack traces Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  26. Future improvements of the course • Enrich lectures with more practical examples • Reduce the impact of the theoretical tests on the final grade • Currently, it is more than 70% • Update the course with recent developments of Java language and technology • Add new topics? • Automated testing appears to be a good candidate Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

  27. Thank You for your attention!Any questions? Suggestions? Elective Course OOP II: Creation, Experiences, Students' Opinions - DAAD WS 2011, Ohrid, MK

More Related