Our new semester begins in a week (sigh) and I have been asked to switch
from Turbo Pascal to Delphi (Visual Pascal). The idea is to introduce students
to some of the new sophisticated environments and concentrate more on
design skills rather than pure code/data-structures.
I intend to give a few formal lectures to introduce topics such as recursion,
binary files, dynamic data structures and so on. The main bulk of the course,
however, would be like a mini-software engineering class. I am thinking of
dividing them up into groups of about 6 and giving each group a large project.
We would then go through the usual requirements, specs., implementation
sequence, getting each group to present each of these things in class and
asking the others to offer suggestions for improvements etc.
In addition to my own marks based on class participation, presentation, and
final design/documentation/code, I am also considering employing some sort
of peer grading. A written exam is another option, although given the fact
that everyone will be doing different things I am not sure how to arrange it.
One other alternative (given that Delphi is, in my opinion, rather complicated
for new programmers to fathom) is to give groups the option of using standard
Pascal or Delphi. They could then also make presentations about the
environment and its usage. This way they would see more things and have
more opportunity to talk ("teach"), without those who are not yet ready for it
being totally overwhelmed!
I would love to hear from others who have given or intend to give similar
courses, to hear their experiences/suggestions.
thanks,
David Davenport
Computer Eng. & Information Science Dept.,
Bilkent UNiversity, Ankara 06533 - Turkey.
{ email: david @bilkent.edu.tr }
{ URL: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~david/david.html }