Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The last three assignments were each two weeks in length and encouraged creativity
and investigation of Java's class libraries. Assignments accounted for 30% of each student's
grade. Midterm and final exams made up 30 and 35%, respectively, of the class grade, and each
were given for a full class period. The remaining 5% of the grade was for class participation.
Course Content
The content of lectures and assignments began at a rudimentary level and increased
in complexity throughout the semester. Most of the course focused on server-side applica-
tions rather than client-side applets, as the latter require an understanding of a predefined
startup sequence of method calls, system-defined and system-passed arguments, and
inheritance that is gained as the course progresses. In addition, applets are most typically
run from a browser, which will have its own interpreter that may or may not support the latest
version of Java. This leads to a high probability for user frustration that is best held off until
students are more prepared to cope with it.
The first few weeks of the course focused on basic programming concepts, with
students getting minimal exposure to Java's class libraries. Topics covered included data
types, operators, and control structures. Following the approach taken in Gittleman (2001),
a component from Java's Swing class was used for keyboard input, with detailed explanations
of the component and the package containing it held off until later in the course.
Class and object concepts were first introduced using built-in classes (namely, the Math
and String classes), as well as arrays, which are defined as objects in Java. User-defined
classes came next, followed by the object-oriented concepts of inheritance, polymorphism,
encapsulation, and abstract and interface classes. Additional topics included dynamic data
structures, exception handling, and file I/O.
Students were first guided through Java's class libraries and then, as the weeks
progressed, encouraged to explore the libraries to find classes and methods for use in
assignments. In the last few weeks of the course, graphics and event handling were taught
using applets.
SURVEY RESULTS
Midway through the first semester of the new MSIT programming course, a total of 58
students from all three sections filled out a survey in which they were asked to rank their prior
programming experience (as previously remarked upon), the degree of difficulty of the course,
the helpfulness of JBuilder, of the course Web site, and of the textbook, and the amount of
time spent on the course each week. A total of 143 students from six preceding semesters of
the programming course taught using Visual Basic (VB) had filled out a similar survey. In the
following sections, results of the Java survey are presented and contrasted to results from
the VB survey whenever possible.
Supporting Materials
The use of JBuilder was only required for the second assignment, yet the majority of
students (86%) continued using this IDE for subsequent assignments. The average rating
of JBuilder was 5.57 ± 1.25 on a seven-point scale ranging from one (
no value
) to seven (
high
value
). Figure 2 shows the distribution.
