In today’s class I announced a few things.

Course plan:
* Today: Distributed Objects (1)
* Friday Nov 27: Distributed Objects (2). Afternoon Lab: No New Assignments, but I will be there for your last Lab assignment.
* Monday Nov 30: Design Patterns/ Last Lab deadline.

– The following two lectures will not be included in the final exam. But I think they may fit your interests.

* Wednesday Dec 2: Reasoning about Multi-Agent Systems (It is about the research I did in my PhD. I think it might be more interesting than the course itself. There is also a relation to the course from the perspective of agents. ) / Last lecture assignment deadline (I will release the assignment today).
* Friday Dec 5: A Review Of This Course (I will review the important stuff we’ve discussed in the past. It might be helpful for you to prepare the final exam. And besides, there will be one last interesting thing I want  to show to you.) /Last Chance to ask me questions in person, as I will travel to Liverpool afterwords.

* Exam Time: 9am-11:30am December 10, 2009
* Location: NH125

Please do come to the next Wednesday’s class. The head of the department will come to let you do an evaluation (filling some forms) on this course, while I will not present in the class. The time slot is:

• 9:15-9:30 am on Wednesday, December 2ed.

After that, we will start an interesting talk on my research.

When I arrived in the classroom on time, there were few students, possibly due to the rain. But I was glad that most of you showed up eventually. There seems to be a separation between Canadian students and the Chinese Students.  So from the next class on, we use a mixture of seats policy:
The ones come after the fourth person should sit in the different side of the aisle from he or she did in the previous class. You are encouraged to know each other better, especially between Canadian girls and Chinese boys. (I omitted the other important option because there is no Chinese girls in the class. The Canadian boys could complain to the head or the admission manager of the dept.)

Yours,

Ji

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In this lecture, we discussed:

• The intuitive and practical meanings of inheritance
• The syntax used to describe inheritance and substitution
• Some of the various forms of inheritance
• The benefits and costs of inheritance

The lecture is canceled for the thanks-giving Monday (October 12, 2009). Have fun.

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We discussed the static, compile time representation of object-oriented programs.

• Lecture 10: Messages, Instances and Initialization. 2009/10/05

We discussed the dynamic, run time behavior of object-oriented programs.

• Lecture 11: A Case Study: Eight Queens 2009/10/07

We did a case study: solving Eight Queens problem in object-oriented approach.

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• Introduction
• Responsibility-Driven Design
• Case Study with Design Components
• UML Diagrams
• Steps of Software Design

Slides:

• http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc7f6bh9_40ff2wrvg4

Prof. Wendy MacCaul attended the lecture 7 and gave me some good advices on improving my teaching. The main idea is to encourage the active involvement of students in the class by asking questions. I believe that interactive teaching is a good style. There is even a small video of Wendy when she was talking. Do you want to see it?

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• Abstraction and Information Hiding
• Levels of Abstraction
• Forms of Abstraction
• A Short History of Abstraction

Here are the slides:

• http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc7f6bh9_32g3tkmqcb

Since the Google Docs Presentation could not be embedded into WordPress blogs, I created a Slideshare.net account today and uploaded the slides. It looks good.

It would be great if I could hock my Slideshare account with my Google account, so whenever there is any changes to the slide files in my Google Docs, the Slideshare will automatically republish it.

By the way, there is an example related to the GFW of China when I talked about the Proxy Design Pattern

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• Programming Paradigms
• Six principles of OOP
• Elements of OOP

The slides： Lecture 2: Thinking Object-Oriented (2)

Any comments?

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• A bit History of Programming Languages
• What is Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
• Why is OOP?
• Popularity of OOP
• Language and Computation

Here is the slide file created using google doc presentation:

• Thinking Object-Oriented (1) 2009/09/14

I am glad that some students liked it. There is certainly a lot to improve in making and delivering the lectures. It is my first time to teach this course. If you have any suggestions, let me know. You can leave comments here, or send me emails directly.

Here is a picture of the classroom (NH245) and some of the students:

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Interestingly enough, today (September 10) is the Teachers’ Day in the People’s Republic of China. I did not know how does this day come until now (check wikipedia). But I did know the basic idea. In Chinese culture, teachers are highly-regarded. People are making analogies between teachers and candles: they are both “burning” themselves to “enlighten” others. I remember when I was a child, my parents taught me to respect and listen carefully to the teachers. When I was naughty, my parents might warn me that they would report to the teachers if I did not behave. In that sense, the teachers have more authorities than the parents. This might be a good thing, though there is at least one strong side effect: students rarely challenge or question their teachers. If you put a Chinese and an English student together in one class, you can note the differences. But of course, situations are always changing, so my observation might not hold for the new generation from China.

On September 6th, the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao attended classes in a junior high school, paying tribute to the teachers. At similar time, USA president Barack Obama gave a national speech to the American students. They both know the importance of investing more in the future generation. But easier said than done. Some figures show that the Chinese government is falling behind of world in supporting education:  in 1985, it invested 2.3% GDP in education, and the world average is 5.2% (developed country average 5.5%, developing country 4.5%); not until 2004, this figure went to 4%, but was still below the world average in 1985. As a Chinese, I really hope that our government can live up to the promise they made to their people.

It is always easier to blame the government. So tomorrow, I will stop blaming, and start to explore what I can do in education. I am looking forward to that.

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