GuidelineS

• Guideline 1: Objects first.
• Guideline 2: Don't start with a blank screen.
• Guideline 3: Read code.
• Guideline 4: Use large projects.
• Guideline 5: Don't start with "main".
• Guideline 6: Don't use "Hello World".
• Guideline 7: Show program structure.
• Guideline 8: Be careful with the user interface.

Teaching starts with presenting large project from beginning. Students would than execute, read, modify and extend existing programs (in that order). "Object early" approach, presents the "big picture" first, allowing for reversal of the order of introduction. Interaction with objects is presented, followed by discussion of the main concepts of the of object orientation.

After that, students are presented with series of progressively more complex tasks:

• Make small modification to existing methods.
• Implement complete method bodies, method signatures are provided.
• Add new methods to existing classes
• Add new classes to existing projects
• Create complete project.

In the second part of this course students leave protected, learning, IDE environment for treatment of lower level issues of Java language. Professional, real world, environments such as command line environment, text editors are used to develop programs and present the elements (syntax and language structure) of Java language:

• The ability to reproduce material that has been learned. Knowledge of facts, ways and means to handle facts, general principals and theories.
• The ability to apply what have been learned, new ideas, theories, principals and methods in new situations.
• The ability to analyze, to decompose and discover relationships between individual parts.
• The ability to reassemble the result of analyses to a new whole.

• Objects First With Java: A Practical Introduction Using BlueJ (2nd Edition), by David J. Barnes and Michael Kölling, Prentice-Hall, September 2002.
• Core Java 2 : Volume 1 Fundamentals (Paperback) by Cay S. Horstmann, Gary Cornell, Sun Microsystems Press , published by Prentice-Hall