Teaching object oriented principles

[Selena Deckelmann]

Anyone have recommended resources?

-selena

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http://chesnok.com

[Preston Holmes]

There is this tidbit:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/000937.html

however I don't think there it is horrible to use duck extends bird type examples in the abstract in the very introduction of a concept (not as full fledged examples though). In teaching, I think it completely OK to lie at the beginning about something to build a conceptual base, then tell them that reality is more complicated.  Sometimes this is a valid way to construct final understanding of something that may not be intuitive.

-Preston

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[Selena Deckelmann]

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 8:31 AM, Preston Holmes <pre...@ptone.com> wrote:

There is this tidbit:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/000937.html

however I don't think there it is horrible to use duck extends bird type examples in the abstract in the very introduction of a concept (not as full fledged examples though). In teaching, I think it completely OK to lie at the beginning about something to build a conceptual base, then tell them that reality is more complicated.  Sometimes this is a valid way to construct final understanding of something that may not be intuitive.

Hah!

So, here's a raw text dump from part of an online course that the Florida Virtual School has online:

https://pyladies.etherpad.mozilla.org/4

I haven't tried to fix this up yet, because I found the examples confusing and not very helpful to the people I showed it to.

Now, what I am trying instead to help the group write a program together to solve one person's problem: she's got a fancy plant that needs a regular watering schedule. We're going to create some classes and a small program that implements a schedule and texts her when she needs to water the plant. What's great is, as soon as she brought up her problem, another couple people said they had the same problem. So now we get to generalize our solution to them! :)

It seems simple enough that we could get it all done in 2-3 hours, while also explaining the details of what's happening at each step to a group of about 8.

The big question I got last night was "How do I tell whether something involved in this code qualifies to be a class or not?"  I didn't have a great answer, because as I thought about it, I realized it is a complex thing for me personally - I think mostly in terms of the schema I have to implement, and then about the JOINs I'm going to possibly need to run reports against the data, and then I think about how much code it involves -- and then I simplify. All that in a loop.

( the meetup last night was to go over homework for a Coursera class. I tried to dodge the OOP questions because I wasn't prepared, but the women there wanted to go there anyway, and we had a discussion that was somewhat helpful, but I felt pretty dissatisfied with my part in it )

-selena