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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

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

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  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

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