Session details: Educators' & trainers' symposium
Edward F. Gehringer · 2011
This year marks the 20th OOPSLA/SPLASH Educators' and Trainers' Symposium. The past two decades have witnessed several stages of evolution of o-o in education. At first, efforts were directed at getting objects into the curriculum. During the second stage, in the latter half of the nineties, o-o moved from being an advanced subject to one that dominated introductory courses. Since then, the discipline has become more research oriented, with studies on how best to teach o-o. In the early years of the last decade, pair programming and "objects first" were hot topics. While pair programming has become routine, the past few years have seen a retreat from the concept of "objects first." In the past five or six years, a recurring theme has been the need to effectively manage large projects undertaken by students. At the same time, the importance of parallelism has become increasingly obvious. That realization led to the change in conference name last year, from one devoted to o-o in particular, to one more generally devoted to advances in programming technology and teaching programming.