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Re: Teaching Java, teaching what?

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On 8 Dec 2013 16:00:00 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

>   Many Java classes and Java books teach Java foundations and
>   then Java OOP to finally be able to show how Swing can be
>   used to create programs that look like beginners expect
>   programs to look like, i.e., they do not write some text to
>   an old-fashioned text console, but run as a GUI windows.

>   But then, I hear everywhere: »Java on the Desktop is dead.«.
>   Now I asked myself: Is it wrong to teach how to write Java
>   desktop applications in a class (using Swing)? After all,
>   you do not want to waste the time of the students by
>   teaching them something that is »dead«?

Ok, Java on the desktop certainly isn't dead, heck, even gaming in Java has
just recently excited millions and millions of people with stuff like
Minecraft.

But that being said, Swing/GUI is a comparatively 'hard' task, spanning a
huge VOLUME of information. By that I mean that unlike, say, Reflection, or
big O notation, Swing isn't just something you have to 'understand', but
also something that even while teaching the brightest students will take a
long time due to how many pieces there are that people will need to
understand to do the bare minimum.

If you can keep your students interested without touching Swing, I'd say
stay away from it, or maybe provide links to tutorials for the interested
students. If your students are not excited by console apps, you might want
to consider other things to teach that interest them. 

For example, it is relatively trivial to produce a basic framework allowing
people to move things on the screen in a framework like libGDX (like, as a
game). It might not exactly be a job skill, but then neither will one
course of Swing intro be.

Liebe Gruesse,
		Joerg

-- 
Ich lese meine Emails nicht, replies to Email bleiben also leider
ungelesen.

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Re: Teaching Java, teaching what? Joerg Meier <joergmmeier@arcor.de> - 2013-12-09 02:43 +0100

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