[DrJava] Summer Plans

[Peter C. <pe...@ce...>]

I have some good news for the DrJava team.  Yesterday I met with three 
lecturers from the introductory programming group here at CMU.  They 
have been using CodeWarrior for their courses and are becoming 
increasingly dissatisfied with it, so they gave me the chance to sell 
them on using DrJava instead.  After an hour of demos and discussion, 
they agreed to begin experimenting with DrJava this summer.

More importantly for you, they agreed to sponsor me in an independent 
study course to work with them.  My goals will be to 1: investigate how 
teachers can leverage DrJava for pedagogic purposes in their courses, 
and 2: improve DrJava to better support student needs.  Working on #2 
will involve changes to the code that I will feed back to the group.  
More importantly, I will be collecting data from both of our user 
groups to guide future development.  I plan to publish my incremental 
results on the web, and I will keep the list(s) informed about 
important findings.

For those of you working to support TeachJava, one of the courses I 
will be assisting is an AP level course for high school students.  The 
teachers have already been looking at the materials for past workshops, 
and this summer will provide a good opportunity to field test some of 
your methods.  In the past, CMU's introductory courses have started 
with a procedural-style emphasis on mechanics.  It will be interesting 
to see how pushing design patterns down into this level changes the 
style of their courses.

If any of you have suggestions or questions for me, I would appreciate 
the feedback as I develop specific plans for my work.  It's because of 
your past innovations in teaching that I have so much to contribute to 
CMU in the first place.  Thanks for the great work -- I hope to be part 
of that process again soon.

--
Peter