Teaching OOD from the Beginning1 of 3

Karel is Kool• Visual Feedback is Powerful – students see their

mistakes/triumphs• Stay within one common metaphor for a while so

students can focus on important topics and retain some prior knowledge as they move through the topics – it won’t seem so disconnected to them

• Most major concepts covered in short period of time– Inheritance, Polymorphism, Abstraction, Encapsulation, OOP-

Design, Recursion, Iteration, Selection, …

• AP’s emphasis on OOP – new paradigm for most of us – we need help thinking/teaching in a new way

Teaching OOD from the Beginning2 of 3

More reasons Karel is Kool…• Filters out many(relevant) details so one can focus

on the major concepts– Not in danger of losing sight of the Forest (computer

science) through the details of the Trees (java details) • It’s pure Java • Introduce many major topics in a short period of

time – not too much detail– then, as the yr. goes on, you will spiral back through

those topics introducing more and more detail as required

• 8-10 Week (or more or less) well-planned unit with hw, labs, quizzes, tests, ppts, text – which ensures proper ordering of topics and covers most AP A topics – wow, sounds like Heaven

Teaching OOD from the Beginning3 of 3

Even more reasons Karel is Kool…

• variety of robot tasks are both plentiful and provocative – all based on a set of primitives– Same exact principle in Geometry, Carpentry, …

• up and running with coding in a very short period of time – students get hands-on, non-trivial experience - immediately

• Lots of support – see www.apcomputerscience.com and others• FREE!