Tutorials

There will be five half day tutorials and one full day tutorial during Sunday 23th and Thursday 27th june. Click on the title to read an abstract.

Sunday

Object-oriented languages have been taught for some time at universities. A common approach has been to teach those constructs required for imperative programming first and to introduce the notion of classes and objects somewhat later in the course. More recently, many educators have been promoting the notion of teaching about classes and objects first. This helps students to adopt the object-oriented paradigm at an early stage and encourages them to focus on the application structure before beginning coding. Most new textbooks have followed such an approach.

Java is now the most commonly used language for teaching introductory object-oriented programming courses. Many instructors are trying to teach "objects-first" courses in Java, and they are encountering numerous difficulties. The question of how to structure an introductory object-oriented programming course in Java that follows the objects-first approach still seems to be largely unanswered.

This tutorial will discuss numerous problems that teachers face in teaching an introductory object-oriented programming course with Java, and show how the BlueJ environment can be used to solve or avoid many of the problems. We will present many examples of teaching techniques, exercises and assignments that may be used in such a course.

Description in .pdf-format

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The tutorial will include presentation of concepts and constructs of Java with CSP. Each presentation will be followed by an opportunity for participants to carry out exercises that demonstrate the use of the ideas covered in the presentation. Participant solutions will be discussed and compared to the instructor’s solutions in order to develop a fuller understanding of the use of Java with CSP.

Description in .pdf-format

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Modeling enjoys a central position in object-oriented software development. Unfortunately, techniques for modeling, and the industry standard Unified Modeling Language (UML) in particular, have been criticized as being too complex in teaching situations. The tutorial will present a mixture of techniques for overcoming this complexity in teaching and learning UML modeling based on the use of the Ideogramic UML tool for gesture-based, collaborative modeling.

Description in .pdf-format

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The overall objective of this tutorial is to disseminate the collection of Java student laboratories developed at Northeastern University for freshman computer science and to teach faculty about the Java Power Tools so that they will be able to easily build additional laboratories on their own. The lab materials emphasize high quality graphical user interfaces that provide excellent student interactivity and feedback. The tools are the software technology that enables these labs to be built quite rapidly so that faculty need not spend inordinate amounts of time in the creation of lab materials. The workshop will also demonstrate the Automatic Problem Set Framework that enables faculty and students to define (in a matter of minutes) methods to solve small problems or test class definitions and then to execute these methods in an automatically created GUI framework. Time will be allocated in the workshop for open discussion of freshman pedagogy, especially, objects first and the use of GUIs.

Description in .pdf-format

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Autonomous agents are systems that inhabit a dynamic environment in which they try to satisfy a set of time-varying goals. An agent can sense the environment through its sensors and act upon the environment using its actuators. The agent decides how to relate its sensor data and internal state to actuator commands in such a way that its goals are attended to successfully. For agents like mobile robots the goal of the agent might be to find its way to a battery recharge station while avoiding obstacles. In multi-agent systems communication among agents can be used to exchange information to achieve common goals like dancing or playing music.

The LEGO MindStorms RCX computer will be used as an example of a controller that can be used to implement an agent. Several such agents can communicate through the RCX infra-red transmitter/receiver. The RCX computer is programmed in C to provide low-level control of sensors, actuators and cpu scheduling. The tutorial will take place in a lab where participants will gain experience with LEGO MindStorm robots.

Description in .pdf-format.