Teaching Novices Programming and Important Applications in a Single Semester - Critical Factors from Zero to Portable GUI Programming in Four Hours

In the past 35 years employing systematically participative observation a lecture got created that allows for teaching novices programming from zero and empowering them to apply their knowledge to program e.g. MS Office and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, to create client-server socket programs and to create portable GUI programs, all in a single semester (four months, four contact hours per week). It may be noticeable that despite the teaching load of 8 ECTS (200 hours) there are no drop-outs among the participating business information students.

Workshop Content

This workshop introduces the developed pedagogical concept, the infrastructures that can be used, the syllabus and the parts of it that are key for the overall success of this lecture. There will be a few small nutshell examples presented with the intent to exemplify what can be achieved. This approach in the workshop should allow any attendee to analytically assess the overall concept, the building blocks and the applicability of the learning outcome for the students who start as novices at the beginning of the semester. At the end of lecture the novice students will be able to create programs that control Windows programs via OLE (object linking and embedding), apply curl for interacting with web resources, create portable client-server socket programs, become able to process XML and HTML5 text, and even create portable, complex GUIs exploiting the powerful JavaFX framework.