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

[Jeffrey Elkner]

One more note on this topic.  I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that
the best way to teach any programming, OOP or otherwise, is using Test
Driven Development (TDD).  DocTest is an absolutely wonderful tool in
this regard (thanks to Tim Peters!).  I write the assignment as a
collection of tests, which the students are asked to pass one at a time.
They find it fun and empowering, since it helps them break down complex
tasks into simple steps.  More students are able to solve the problem,
and to better understand difficulties they have along the way.

I only discovered DocTest a few weeks ago, but if anyone is interested
in seeing my first attempt at writing lessons with it you can see them
here:

http://linus.yhspatriot.net/cs/cs

(note: this site changes rapidly, so the lessons might not be here
later, but I plan to refine them a bit and put them on the Python
Biblioteca:

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/pyBiblio/


On Fri, 2005-03-25 at 19:36 +0100, Laura Creighton wrote:
> If you want to teach OOP but don't want to teach GUI programming,
> it is often convenient to develop some text processing tools, using objects
> like 'words' 'paragraphs' 'names' and what have you.
> 
> Laura

-- 
Jeffrey Elkner <jeff at elkner.net>
Open Book Project <http://ibiblio.org/obp>