Good examples of programming course lecture notes

[clemenr]

Hi. I'm about to write some notes for a university level Java
programming course, specialising in audio/midi applications.

I have quite a bit of experience in designing teaching materials for
programming courses in Java and other languages. However, one thing
that I've never really felt that I've optimised is the organisation of
material on the slides (openoffice, similar to powerpoint) used during
teaching.

I'd like to ask if anyone knows of some programming course they've
taken or are taking where the use of slides/powerpoint was really
effective. It doesn't need to be a Java course as I'm interested in
lookng more at presentation and lecture design styles rather than
content? I've done a lot of searching on the net, but haven't found
anything that I feel is clearly better than what I do now.

Any recommendations? Either online notes, or if the notes are not
publically available, could any readers of this please tell me the
lecturer/prof's name, university, and the name of the course and I can
ask for a sample lecture directly. Or, if other teachers are reading
this, I'd like to hear what they do.

Note: I'm aware of arguments that traditional lectures are not
necessarily the only nor best way of teaching programming, but for the
meantime at least, I have to work in a particular environment that
expects reasonably traditional lectures to occur along with practical
laboratories.

Thanks in anticipation,

Ross-c

 

[Roedy Green]

I'd like to ask if anyone knows of some programming course they've
taken or are taking where the use of slides/powerpoint was really
effective.

I don't think slides belong in the classroom. They are the fastest way
to put students to sleep.

They require low lights which make people drowsy and make note-taking
harder.

The slide just competes with the lecturer for attention. The slide
keeps giving away the punchline.

Slides are for entertaining and selling hypnotically not for
informing.

 

[Roedy Green]

I'd like to ask if anyone knows of some programming course they've
taken or are taking where the use of slides/powerpoint was really
effective. It doesn't need to be a Java course as I'm interested in
lookng more at presentation and lecture design styles rather than
content? I've done a lot of searching on the net, but haven't found
anything that I feel is clearly better than what I do now.

I used to teach a tutorial at UBC, Fortran and assembler. I would
freak out my students my telling them they were not allowed to take
notes. They had to GET what I was saying, not just write it down.

No student ever failed. I had THEM at the boards writing code most of
the time. I could then easily tell if they were getting what I was
teaching. It was unconventional, but very popular. I had all kinds
of students transfer in.

Today, doing the same thing, I would give them an URL with the notes
to read ahead of time and after time. I would never dream of using
slides. You have to grab the students' attention and make every
moment memorable, just the same as if you were dealing with second
graders.

 

[Roedy Green]

I'd like to ask if anyone knows of some programming course they've
taken or are taking where the use of slides/powerpoint was really
effective.

The key thing I have found useful in lecture notes is CODE.
Super-commented code explains far more clearly than any natural
language exposition which tends to slide into a sales pitch or rant.

It also lets you deal with a mixture of very bright and very slow
people. The bright ones absorb all the details of the code. The slow
ones just listen to your overall commentary.

You might see if you can find someone who has been to one of the
Colorado Software conferences to see the notes they provide. They do
use slides. You get the slides which are generally not that useful,
but they give additional notes. These are aimed for peer to peer
communication.

 

[jan V]

I'd like to ask if anyone knows of some programming course they've

I don't think slides belong in the classroom. They are the fastest way
to put students to sleep.

They require low lights which make people drowsy and make note-taking
harder.

Maybe for conventional slides you may have a point, but for PowerPoint-type
presentations projected with a modern projector, the whole show can be done
in normal indoor light.

The slide just competes with the lecturer for attention. The slide
keeps giving away the punchline.

The slides are there to summarize what the lecturer/trainer says. The slides
are the skeletal framework of the course. Printouts of the slides can be
taken home so that the student can go over the presentation again, and the
slides will trigger recall of much that was said.

Slides are for entertaining and selling hypnotically not for informing.

Ah well Roedy, I guess everyone falls in the trap of writing nonsense on
c.l.j.p... even you. For the record I used to be in the Java training
business. Students invariably gave glowing feedback at the end of the 5-day
course... and I can assure you nobody became drowsy in my classes.

 

[jan V]

I used to teach a tutorial at UBC, Fortran and assembler. I would

freak out my students my telling them they were not allowed to take
notes. They had to GET what I was saying, not just write it down.

No student ever failed. I had THEM at the boards writing code most of
the time. I could then easily tell if they were getting what I was
teaching. It was unconventional, but very popular. I had all kinds
of students transfer in.

My courses were chapter based, just like a book, and ended with exercises.
The culmination of the 5-day course, after seeing language fundamentals,
I/O, threading, very basic GUI and networking, was an exercise to create a
token-passing network with all the laptops or PCs in the room, and have each
node in the ring beep when receiving the token before passing it on to the
next node. This exercise forced people to cooperate, first in pairs, then in
threesomes, etc.. until finally, towards the end of the friday, the whole
class was buzzing with excitement and helping to debug the last student's
program which prevented the ring from being completed. The whole course has
heavily slide-oriented, but the effectiveness of the format was clearly
proven by the self-evident learning results obtained towards the end of each
week. The students were professionals though, and their employers paid lots
of money for these courses.

 

[jan V]

The key thing I have found useful in lecture notes is CODE.

Super-commented code explains far more clearly than any natural
language exposition which tends to slide into a sales pitch or rant.

Totally agree. My slides were probably 50% code... coloured,
syntax-highlighted and all (at a time when the competition still used plain
black & white for their code snippets).

 

[Giannis Papadopoulos]

Hi. I'm about to write some notes for a university level Java
programming course, specialising in audio/midi applications.

I have quite a bit of experience in designing teaching materials for
programming courses in Java and other languages. However, one thing
that I've never really felt that I've optimised is the organisation of
material on the slides (openoffice, similar to powerpoint) used during
teaching.

I'd like to ask if anyone knows of some programming course they've
taken or are taking where the use of slides/powerpoint was really
effective. It doesn't need to be a Java course as I'm interested in
lookng more at presentation and lecture design styles rather than
content? I've done a lot of searching on the net, but haven't found
anything that I feel is clearly better than what I do now.

Any recommendations? Either online notes, or if the notes are not
publically available, could any readers of this please tell me the
lecturer/prof's name, university, and the name of the course and I can
ask for a sample lecture directly. Or, if other teachers are reading
this, I'd like to hear what they do.

Note: I'm aware of arguments that traditional lectures are not
necessarily the only nor best way of teaching programming, but for the
meantime at least, I have to work in a particular environment that
expects reasonably traditional lectures to occur along with practical
laboratories.

Thanks in anticipation,

Ross-c

From the student's part - since I still am a student - I never liked
lengthy slideshows with many words and phrases in every slide...

From all the years in my university, I really liked it when the
lecturer had a skeleton slideshow and completed it verbally.

I also liked the use of compiling code and running it at that same time.
It never made any student sleepy and most of them were pretty successful
when applying what they've learnt.

And should a student had a specific question, then the teacher would
just write down the program, try to compile it and explain why this
couldn't run...

--
one's freedom stops where others' begin

Giannis Papadopoulos
http://dop.users.uth.gr/
University of Thessaly
Computer & Communications Engineering dept.

 

[Roedy Green]

Ah well Roedy, I guess everyone falls in the trap of writing nonsense on
c.l.j.p... even you. For the record I used to be in the Java training
business. Students invariably gave glowing feedback at the end of the 5-day
course... and I can assure you nobody became drowsy in my classes.

Then you were probably using the slides more as cues to yourself about
the next topic. The slide itself probably said very little, just the
topic so it did not distract your audience from what you were saying.

Hell is going to a slide presentation where the lecturer reads the
slides to you and says nothing else.

 

[Roedy Green]

The students were professionals though, and their employers paid lots
of money for these courses.

I suspect your success came DESPITE the slides because you did the
other stuff so well and because you had highly motivated students.

People who hate presenting rely on slides and natural hams tend to use
them sparingly. All the most boring presentations I have seen in my
life had slides. The best had none. Perhaps for me is a form of
Pavlovian conditioning when I see a slide.

I have lived through repeated IBM mainframe sales pitches delivered in
the 1970s delivered by slide in a special drone the salesmen learned
at IBM sales school. Cringe!

Then there was Terence McKenna's (a expert on South American
psychedelic plants) slide presentation --- anything but boring, but
definitely distracting.

The presentations where slides worked were where the lecturer was
trying to show you something -- e.g. environmental damage, or the
effects of poor dental hygiene in the HIV+ patients. It works far
less well to just display some text no matter what sort of gewjaws you
decorate it with.

 

[Patricia Shanahan]

I used to teach a tutorial at UBC, Fortran and assembler. I would
freak out my students my telling them they were not allowed to take
notes. They had to GET what I was saying, not just write it down.

Shouldn't teaching methods be arrange to accommodate a range of learning
styles?

I would like your tutorial, because I can't think and do handwriting at
the same time. I try to avoid any substantial note taking, to the extent
of using a digital camera to capture blackboard material.

On the other hand, some of my fellow students say they don't fully get
anything until they have written it, and take extensive notes as a means
to understanding.

Patricia

 

[Andrew Thompson]

..Then there was Terence McKenna's (a expert on South American
psychedelic plants) slide presentation --- anything but boring, but
definitely distracting.

Maybe the 'slides' were for licking, rather than projecting.
After all, it must be tricky getting those 'psychedelic chemicals'
through customs. ;-)

[ Follow-Ups set to c.l.j.programmer only. ]

 

[jg.campbell.ng]

Hi. I'm about to write some notes for a university level Java
programming course, specialising in audio/midi applications.

I wouldn't mind speaking to you offline about that -- Java audio; it's
in Java based games programming course I'm starting soon, and there
may be some incompatibilities between javax.sound and my intuition.

I have quite a bit of experience in designing teaching materials for
programming courses in Java and other languages. However, one thing
that I've never really felt that I've optimised is the organisation of
material on the slides (openoffice, similar to powerpoint) used during
teaching.

I'd agree with most of what Roedy Green say.

I used to write a course 'textbook', e.g.

http://www.jgcampbell.com/oopcpp99/html/

which was prepared using LaTeX -- that a HTML version from LaTeX2HTML.
As you can see there is a good deal of code, and most time was spent
walking through the code.

The students received a hard copy of the document (12pt); the document
was printed on acetates (yes, 12pt only!) and those used for the
lectures and tutorials and practicals. Each week (not exactly aligned
with chapters) had a set of practical exercises based on the text.

No student, even in anonymous questionnaires, ever complained about the
use of the small print on slides. However, as I was leaving the
institution in 1999, the 'quality' czars were closing in on me and
demanding PowerPoint (yes, they specified the brand) and colour.

Previous experience -- in handwritten slide days -- indicated that
students became confused if there was a course 'text' /and/ slides;
which took precendence? Especially when the lecturer wrote amost the
same again on the slide during the lecture.

Recently, on more descripive courses, I have come back to 'text' plus
slides; but that was after presenting the courses for many years and I
knew /exactly/ what to put on the slides. Also, lectures from slides
are easy for the lecturer and entertaining for students. But do they
learn more? I think less. Or do they get confused when it comes to
exams by having two documents? I have reason to believe that they do.
The level at which I was teaching meant that the bullet points were
plenty to to well in the exams.

To make the slides, I used LaTeX again; normal document, 12pt, and
LARGE font size specifier.

I have always used acetates because I never trusted computer systems
people to provide functional computers + data projectors.

But this year, because of the games course, I'm going to buy my own
data projector and use it with my own laptop. But I agree with other
posters, dim the lights and the audience goes into sleep mode. Same, I
think, was really slick PowerPoint slide shows.

I'd like to ask if anyone knows of some programming course they've
taken or are taking where the use of slides/powerpoint was really
effective. It doesn't need to be a Java course as I'm interested in
lookng more at presentation and lecture design styles rather than
content? I've done a lot of searching on the net, but haven't found
anything that I feel is clearly better than what I do now.

Would PowerPoint (or OpenOffice equivalent) allow you to include
significant chunks of code? At 12pt you can get about 60 lines of code
on a page (portrait mode); you need that for many applications. And
even at that, you have to compromise on white space and comments.

Any recommendations? Either online notes, or if the notes are not
publically available, could any readers of this please tell me the
lecturer/prof's name, university, and the name of the course and I can
ask for a sample lecture directly. Or, if other teachers are reading
this, I'd like to hear what they do.

Yes, there are some fine examples on the web. Later I'll attempt to
collect a few links and post them here. However, from the web, we would
have no idea how the materials are used and presented and what the
total experience is.

Note: I'm aware of arguments that traditional lectures are not
necessarily the only nor best way of teaching programming, but for the
meantime at least, I have to work in a particular environment that
expects reasonably traditional lectures to occur along with practical
laboratories.

I think it is important that the 'notes' (whatever form) are in harmony
with the practical exercises. OTOH, I have only rarely encountered
students who understood how to use this mode correctly -- i.e. go to
the pages in the notes where the concept (in the exercise) was
introduced; review that and the code example. Then attempt the
exercise.

But Westminster is a former (U.K.) polytechnic? Presumably you will
have some 'quality' police there that will have a fixed idea on a
lecturing 'standard' (for all subjects)? I.e. assholes who were no good
at anything and found themselves an easy route up the greasy pole?

Best regards,

Jon C.

 

[jg.campbell.ng]

Hi. I'm about to write some notes for a university level Java
programming course, specialising in audio/midi applications.

[...]


Yes, there are some fine examples on the web. Later I'll attempt to
collect a few links and post them here. However, from the web, we would
have no idea how the materials are used and presented and what the
total experience is.

Not really answering your question, but I am most impressed with:

http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~schmidt/CIS200/

And maybe the combination of PDF and HTML is useful? HTML more
projectable?

If you rummage around in Cambridge (UK) and MIT sites (e.g. Daniel
Jackson) you will find good examples.

Jon C.

 

[Arthur J. O'Dwyer]

Hi. I'm about to write some notes for a university level Java
programming course, specialising in audio/midi applications. [...]
I'd like to ask if anyone knows of some programming course they've
taken or are taking where the use of slides/powerpoint was really
effective. It doesn't need to be a Java course as I'm interested in
lookng more at presentation and lecture design styles rather than
content? I've done a lot of searching on the net, but haven't found
anything that I feel is clearly better than what I do now.

CMU's 15-411 Compiler Design course used good slides last year.
(Unfortunately, a cursory Google search didn't turn up any examples.)
Of course, compiler design is well suited to slides, since for example
explaining code generation involves a lot of impenetrable assembly code
organized in blocks with arrows showing control flow --- easy to show with
Powerpoint, hard to show on the blackboard. I'm not sure any lessons will
really be applicable to teaching Java, though.

Anyway, the person who said that the primary use of Powerpoint slides is
to print out and use as a summary of the lecture was right. If you're
making a presentation, you want the slides to complement what you're
saying and reinforce your message visually; but if you're doing a lecture,
the slides are more like pre-generated lecture notes, and it's more
important that they make sense on their own a week after the lecture.

In Fall 2004, the principal lecturer for 15-411 was Peter Lee.

HTH,
-Arthur

 

[yakovfain]

When I teach programming, I talk, write on the white board and give
handouts (see www.smartdataprocessing.com). Slides are more
appropriate for talks at the conferences.

If you teach kids, cartoon-like drawings help. Take a look at
http://java.sys-con.com/read/44575.htm


Regards,
Yakov Fain
http://www.weekendwithexperts.com

 

[Chris McDonald]

Hello Ross,

Thanks for raising an interesting topic.
I think that you'll get a very helpful (and opinionated) response if
you ask your question again in comp.edu

It's read by Computer Science educators, that present lectures on
programming and languages, all day long.

______________________________________________________________________________
Dr Chris McDonald E: (e-mail address removed)
Computer Science & Software Engineering W: http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~chris
The University of Western Australia, M002 T: +618 6488 2533
Crawley, Western Australia, 6009 F: +618 6488 1089

 

[jg.campbell.ng]

Hi. I'm about to write some notes for a university level Java
programming course, specialising in audio/midi applications.

[...]


Yes, there are some fine examples on the web. Later I'll attempt to
collect a few links and post them here. However, from the web, we would
have no idea how the materials are used and presented and what the
total experience is.

Not really answering your question, but I am most impressed with:

http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~schmidt/CIS200/

And maybe the combination of PDF and HTML is useful? HTML more
projectable?

If you rummage around in Cambridge (UK) and MIT sites (e.g. Daniel
Jackson) you will find good examples.

Books that might contain ideas:

Cay Horstman, Big Java; Cay Horstman, Java Concepts; (Big Java is the
same with some chapters added). Sierra and Bates, Head First Java (not
everyone's cup of tea, but wothwhile pedagogical lessons in it); Barnes
and Kolling, Objects First with Java (BlueJ); Bruce Eckel's Thinking in
Java.

I was speaking to a former colleagues last week; for his first year
programming class, he has prepared an initial "Java Reference Manual"
-- 32 tightly packed pages. They have eventually settled on JCreator
(www.jcreator.com) as their development environment.

Something like the latter compact reference is important -- to
supplement notes; most students will balk at a book more than 200 pages
(e.g. Java in a Nutshell); they will certainly balk at having to use
multiple documents.

Sesoft's Java Precisely (< 100 pages) may be useful as a (small)
reference.

Good luck,

Jon C.

 

[Aggro]

No student ever failed. I had THEM at the boards writing code most of
the time. I could then easily tell if they were getting what I was
teaching.

That is a very good method. But there is a small risk that only few
students go to the boards and the rest don't have a clue about what is
happening, while the few get it complitely.

Teacher shouldn't ask for volunteers to get to the boards, teacher
should try to find the one who least understands the subject and make
that person come up to the board.

This can be very slow, since some things has to be repeated over and
over again for everyone to understand. But IMHO, it is better to have
only one hour of studying, when you fully understand everything. Rather
than going to school every day for a 6 months and understand nothing.

I'm not a teacher, but I have been a student for a great variety of
teachers. I'm lazy student, like most of my class has been. I hardly
ever do homework, so it is very important that I learn the things in the
class room and that I have time to try and use that information.

 

[hawat.thufir]

Patricia Shanahan wrote:
....

I would like your tutorial, because I can't think and do handwriting at
the same time. I try to avoid any substantial note taking, to the extent
of using a digital camera to capture blackboard material.

....

Some teachers don't like tape recorders, although I suppose you could
be surreptitious about "bugging" the class. Do you get objections from
the teachers about the camera?

-Thufir