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Kickaha
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2011-05-14, 01:26

Very nice. Getting a chance to do it wrong is the only way that you learn why the pattern is how to do it right, and that's what most patterns classes are missing. They try and teach students, who usually have almost no experience at design, "Here's how to do it", but without the background to appreciate why it's the right way, there's no comprehension to speak of. Students just end up faithfully copying the pattern without thinking about it.

The problem is, something like the GoF level of pattern is usually quite a bit beyond the experience scope of the students they're teaching to. By giving students much smaller patterns in the EDPs, it lets them see solutions to problems they're going to run into from day 1. They learn the wrong way, and the right way, at the same time, from the ground up.

And, by showing them how to think about design as building blocks, and giving them the tools to decompose and recompose design and implementation side by side, they can advance their own learning incrementally as needed.

Basically it's not teaching them design, it's teaching them how to think about, and learn about, design.

I think that's a much more powerful tool, in the end.

The fun thing is, this came out of research to teach a computer how to detect design patterns from source code, by looking for small building blocks and putting them together in well-formed ways. Once I had that licked, I realized that I could write it up and teach people how to do something similar.
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