Updating CSCI 205

CSCI 205

Java

Teaching

Published

November 23, 2019

CSCI 205 has been a highly successful course for our majors. It is a lot of work for students, and likewise for the instructors who teach it (myself and Prof. Chris Dancy.) But, the rewards have been plenty, as the course teaches a lot about there is a lot of material that is out of date. The course will still relying on Java 7, and used Netbeans.

I’ve taken quite a bit of extra time this semester to update some of the course. As of Fall 2019, the course has been updated in the following ways:

We are now using IntelliJ IDEA
The course has been updated to Java 12
Many videos have been re-recorded to address the updated content, including:
- Heavier emphasis on lambda expressions than ever before
- Teaching more java.nio and java.nio2 along with java.io
- Added new material on socket programming with java.net
- Added new material on multithreading and concurrency in Java
- Introduced the Java Stream API (not to be confused with the I/O streams)
The final project has been overhauled. Every student now must use Gitlab for all their Scrum task board and sprint management (This has worked surprisingly well!)
Expanded the JavaFX material

It’s a start. There is a lot to be done still.

In a recent discussion with Chris Dancy, he expressed significant interest in incorporating elements of engineering social justice into the course. This represents a broader move by the engineering community at large to start helping our students recognize the impact that their choices have on humanity. I am at fault here. Like many of us, we focus on the goals without teaching our students the impacts that their choices have. Well, that’s not entirely true. I discuss impact – computational resource impact. That’s not enough. I do not give enough attention to social, moral or ethical impact. So, I believe this will be the next set of revisions we make to the course. Chris may likely start on some of those changes in Spring 2020. But, we’ll likely make a more substantial effort to incorporate this into the project over the summer. It’s time for engineers to emphasize people as more important considerations than profits.