Core Java certificate course (6/7-Oct-2012)

There was a core Java certificate course by Computer Society of India, Hyderabad chapter on 6th and 7th of October. My colleague Nandini and I conducted the session at the CSI office, which is located opposite Secunderabad railway station.

The course schedule was:
Day-1
a) Introduction : Classes and Objects b) Primitives and references c) Coffee / Tea Break d) Flow control and operations e) Lunch Break f) Inheritance and Polymorphism g) Coffee / Tea Break, and h)Exception Handling.

Day-2
a) Serialization and File I/O b) Collections c) Coffee / Tea Break d) Networking and Multithreading e) Lunch Break f) Summary: Recap using tutorials g) Code Walk through: 3 practical examples h) Coffee / Tea Break i) Question bank and answers, and j) Concluding session.

42 engineering students attended the course. Of them, the biggest groups were from CMR Technical Campus and BVRIT.

There were quite a few interesting aspects that were particularly gratifying. After the module on Multithreading, the students grilled me, particularly on deadlocking, so much so that that for me the concepts became more clearer.

As you can see in the schedule, we have one module called “Question bank and answers”. We used Powerpoint, with a question on one slide and its answer on the following slide. Nandini conducted this module. The students were very active and interactive during this part. She formed the girls into one team and the boys into another team. The girls team raised hands and got the answers right more often than the boys.

In the “Code Walk through : 3 practical examples” module, one example is on prime numbers. This topic was particularly spirited. I started with prime number definition, and then showed a Java method that determines whether a number is prime or not. Then I discussed how the brute force logic can be improvised. Using that as a base, I moved on to finding all prime numbers less than a given number. I asked the students what the logic should be. I think it was some BVRIT students who got it right - the logic of the classic Sieve of Eratosthenes. I discussed the Java implementation and showed them the code using an array of booleans.

In the recap module (conducted by Nandini) we used two sites: one, tutorialspoint to go over all the key points taught in the two days. This is a very useful site of tutorials for a quick check on basics. There second one is compileonline where one could try code snippets quickly.

For the joy of teaching programming and sharing knowledge, I hope to conduct more sessions on core Java and Java EE in Hyderabad. And make them better. For example, I realized that the Sieve of Eratosthenes implementation can be made even more efficient with BitSet, as given in the book Core Java by Gary Horstmann. Hence, with each session we will improvise our material and teaching style.

The complete photoset of the event is available at this link.