Karel is Kool

							                    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 won’t
  seem so disconnected to them
• Most major concepts covered in short period of time
   – Inheritance, Polymorphism, Abstraction, Encapsulation, OOP-
     Design, Recursion, Iteration, Selection, …
• AP’s emphasis on OOP – new paradigm for most of us –
  we need help thinking/teaching in a new way

                       Teaching OOD from the Beginning
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  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)
• It’s 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
                     Teaching OOD from the Beginning
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             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 www.apcomputerscience.com and others
• FREE!

                    Teaching OOD from the Beginning
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