GUIGraph: editing live object diagrams for GUI generation enables new pedagogy in CS1/2

Authors:
Duane Buck
Affiliations:
Otterbein University, Westerville, OH, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Year:
2011

Citing 7
Cited 2

An object-oriented program development environment for the first programming course

SIGCSE '96 Proceedings of the twenty-seventh SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Design early considered harmful: graduated exposure to complexity and structure based on levels of cognitive development

Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
A beginner's guide to using pyGTK and Glade

Linux Journal
Dynamic object viewers for data structures

Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Objects First With Java: A Practical Introduction Using BlueJ

Objects First With Java: A Practical Introduction Using BlueJ
Recognizing the most influential CS education papers

Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
User interface declarative models and development environments: a survey

DSV-IS'00 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Design, specification, and verification of interactive systems

Integrating video components in CS1

Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
Objektgraph: why code when MVC applications can be generated with UML-based diagrams?

Proceedings of the 2013 companion publication for conference on Systems, programming, & applications: software for humanity

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The GUIGraph software tool supports a new pedagogy, motivates students, and solves early user-interface issues. Regardless of the type of curriculum, it can provide an initial, intuitive introduction to object-oriented thinking, even before coding is discussed. By editing a UML-like object diagram, the student creates and links virtual Java Swing objects representing a user-interface, and can instantly view and manipulate its realization. GUIGraph is unique in that the student specifies an object structure to be created, equivalent to writing complex source code. When requested, GUIGraph generates the Java source code of an abstract class that constructs the object structure. The student then completes the coding of a concrete class that implements its application specific abstract methods. The functionality of the application is cleanly separated from its user-interface, which helps build design intuition, and iterative refinement of the user-interface is supported by regenerating the abstract class.