Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!news-1.dfn.de!news.dfn.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Robert Klemme Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: Teaching Java, teaching what? Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2013 22:11:19 +0100 Lines: 29 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net d80k55w39927AUcVDhcLgA3lgMX3cyqBDCkCb1AILJXh4JFr8= Cancel-Lock: sha1:x6mDP7MDwlbSaoeuVGQfpkvHUhU= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.1.1 In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:26832 On 09.12.2013 16:06, Arved Sandstrom wrote: > On 12/08/2013 01:30 PM, Leif Roar Moldskred wrote: >> Depends on what the class is meant to teach. If the point is >> to teach GUI or event-driven programming and the students >> already have experience with Java from earlier courses, fair >> enough. If the point is to teach general programming or the >> Java programming language, I think time and effort could >> be invested a lot more wisely than teaching Swing. > I'll add this: we're talking about teaching _programmers_, not users of > an application. Hence the comments about wanting to present a GUI rather > than a text console are not really relevant. A working software > developer is going to be looking at text console output and log files a > lot, and maybe debugger displays...regardless of what the user interface > is. So that's what you accustom your students to. But then again there is the motivational effect: seeing something visually in a graphical UI can be much more rewarding than some characters on a console - at least for some. On that grounds I would not totally dismiss teaching Swing - even if event based programming or user interfaces is not the primary goal of the lesson. Some care should be applied to not focus too much on the Swing side then, e.g. by providing some framework or application where learners fill in certain parts. Kind regards robert