1 of 3 Teaching OOD from the Beginning Karel is Kool Visual Feedback is Powerful – students see their mistakes/triumphs Stay within one common metaphor for a while so students can focus on important topics and retain some prior knowledge as they move through the topics – it wont seem so disconnected to them Most major concepts covered in short period of time –Inheritance, Polymorphism, Abstraction, Encapsulation, OOP- Design, Recursion, Iteration, Selection, … APs emphasis on OOP – new paradigm for most of us – we need help thinking/teaching in a new way

2 of 3 Teaching OOD from the Beginning More reasons Karel is Kool… Filters out many(relevant) details so one can focus on the major concepts –Not in danger of losing sight of the Forest (computer science) through the details of the Trees (java details) Its pure Java Introduce many major topics in a short period of time – not too much detail –then, as the yr. goes on, you will spiral back through those topics introducing more and more detail as required 8-10 Week (or more or less) well-planned unit with hw, labs, quizzes, tests, ppts, text – which ensures proper ordering of topics and covers most AP A topics – wow, sounds like Heaven

3 of 3 Teaching OOD from the Beginning Even more reasons Karel is Kool… variety of robot tasks are both plentiful and provocative – all based on a set of primitives –Same exact principle in Geometry, Carpentry, … up and running with coding in a very short period of time – students get hands-on, non-trivial experience - immediately Lots of support – see and others FREE!