[Edu-sig] Re: Best approach to teaching OOP and graphics

[urnerk at qwest.net]

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Dan Crosta dcrosta at sccs.swarthmore.edu
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:52:37 -0500 (EST)
To: edu-sig at python.org
Subject: [Edu-sig] Re: Best approach to teaching OOP and graphics


Linda Grandell wrote:
> > > In my book, OOP and graphical programming *are* two different things.

>> I totally agree on this. What I, however, do see as a potential risk
>> here is that the division might lead to students thinking thoughts such
>> as

>First of all, I disagree here. Well -- they are. But they really shouldn't
>be. 

Although we sound like a disagreeable bunch perhaps, I think we're all in
general agreement.

Graphics programming is very OOPish in most implementations and it makes a 
whole lot of sense to do graphical programming (GUIs, games, whatever) 
using objects.

The typical think is to export an API in the form of objects with methods
and properties.  This is how every Pythonic graphics library I'm aware of
works.  You import a module and you get access to a lot of GUI widgets in 
the form of objects with methods.  You can subclass these widgets or compose
them, the way OOPers always do.  Typically, we instantiate a window or
frame object (some canvas deal) and populate it with buttons, pull-downs
and whatever it is.  Typically, clicking or mousing over results in events,
which our code traps, often by means of callbacks, but maybe by means of
the observable/observer design pattern (like Java's).  Typically the events
themselves are objects (e.g. mouse over events).

I just saw a demo of using Python on the Nokia 60-series (a cell phone
model).  Same thing:  a little phone-specific API is imported and appears
to the programmer as objects.

>Python). Once we got into the real meat of the assignments, we had a much
>easier time when we only had to reimplement a few functions, thanks to
>inheritance, rather than rewriting whole functions from the ground up.

Absolutely.  I bet we all agree.

>To finish, I'd say that you should consider what you want the students to
>get out of the course: if you just want them to have a good time, then
>programming some procedural stuff with graphics (say, a tron-like game,
>which I did in Java/AWT/Swing when I was in high school) might be a good
>idea. If you want them to really learn about object orientation, I think
>working in an object-oriented modeling system, even if you just end up
>doing simple 2D stuff, makes a whole lot more sense to me.
>
>dsc

I'm a little confused why you'd bring up Java/AWT/Swing as your example 
of doing some procedural stuff with graphics, as this language is highly
object oriented in the way you described previously.

But here's the thing, the question I think we're asking in this thread: 
how do we make it clear to students that OOP is NOT *just* about graphical
programming?   You can write highly object oriented code that has no GUI
whatsoever, is invoked only from the command line with switches, maybe runs
in the background as a daemon process (like a database) and communicates
with the outer world only through some ports over TCP/IP.  Is there
anything less OOP about such code, which has no graphical shell?  No.  OOP,
as a concept, is conceptually distinguishable from doing GUI or game or
graphical programming, even though, as a paradigm, it has become probably
the most popular way of doing all of those things.

Kirby

Other fun things at Pycon 2005:

Python used to write a prototype Air Traffic Control system (prototype only
in the sense that it's not commercial yet -- not in the sense that the
"real" version would be written in something else (it'd stay Python)).

Python used in a language teaching engine with Unreal Tournament 2003 as
the simulator (showing fictional Iraqi town) and a speech recognizer. 
Soldiers train on this before going to Iraq.  The mission is basically one
of "take me to your leader" except it's more "Hi, I'm Joe, this is my team,
where's your main guy and could you please give me directions" (all in
Arabic, with the detailed directions likewise in Arabic).

I did a presentation on Hypertoons that generated some interest.


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