Treffer: A Framework-Based Approach to Teaching OOT: Aims, Implementation, and Experience

We report on experience from teaching OO technology to undergraduate students. Before they can successfully tackle the projects they have to successfully shift to the OO paradigm, pick up a working knowledge of some OO language, learn and practice OOA and OOD, and get used to advanced ideas like patterns and frameworks. In order to relieve this heavy burden somewhat, we provided an object-oriented application framework as a common base for the projects. That way, the students are given an architecture which they have to adapt to their specific task instead of doing all the design by themselves. We also believe that this policy closely resembles the way beginners are integrated into on-going projects in practice. We describe the Java framework we used, the preparations for and the organization of the project course, educators' and students' experience and some ideas for developing this approach further.