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The JavaFest: A Collaborative Learning Technique for Java Programming Courses

The JavaFest: A Collaborative Learning Technique for Java Programming Courses
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Conference Paper: PPPJ'08, September, 2008

Learning to create well-designed and robust Java programs requires, besides a good understanding of the language, a significant amount of practice. In this paper we present the JavaFest, a collaborative learning technique for teaching Java to beginning programmers. A JavaFest is a group exercise that instructors can add to their repertoire of teaching techniques. It provides an opportunity for students to practice programming in a motivating but non-threatening environment, and to learn from the experience of their peers. Moreover, a JavaFest allows the instructor to gain insight into the current standing of the students in her class.

We describe the concept of a JavaFest and present three case studies in the form of three concrete JavaFests we developed and evaluated in our own object-oriented programming course. The general idea of a JavaFest, and the three specific examples we describe and evaluate, can easily be adopted to enhance any Java programming course.

@inproceedings{Hauswirth08, author = {Hauswirth, Matthias and Zaparanuks, Dmitrijs and Malekpour, Amirhossein and Keikha, Mostafa}, title = {The JavaFest: a collaborative learning technique for Java programming courses}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th international symposium on Principles and practice of programming in Java}, series = {PPPJ '08}, year = {2008}, isbn = {978-1-60558-223-8}, location = {Modena, Italy}, pages = {3--12}, numpages = {10}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1411732.1411734}, doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1411732.1411734}, acmid = {1411734}, publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, keywords = {collaborative learning}, }

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