DConf '23--A Semester at University: Teaching/Learning Software Engineering in D--Mike Shah et al.
In January of 2023, Mike Shah excitedly showed a group of over 110 university students that D is the 46th most popular programming language on the Tiobe Index (for whatever its metrics are)—and then told those students they would be learning D in the software engineering course that semester.
In first half of this combined talk, he recaps his university curriculum of how he taught D, and why he thinks D should be taught by more faculty in universities. For this software engineering course, his students made use of low-level access, multiple programming paradigms, built-in profilers, package management (DUB), code coverage, Ddoc, and unit testing in order to build a half-semester long project. Mike's conclusion is that using D at university can give students a competitive advantage versus other languages, and in here he reflects on the curriculum, pain points, strengths, and future of D in education.
In the second half of the combined talk, four of Mike's top students--Andrew Briasco-_Stewart, Elizabeth Williams, Steven Abbot, and Ben Mallot--share their perspective of his course, beginning with their experience learning the D programming language. The main portion discusses the creation and implementation of the half-semester long final project the four worked on as a team: an interactive networked whiteboard application with a couple of features (chat, brushes). To conclude, this talk discusses the main benefits of D as a post-secondary educational language and reflects on the state of the D community and development tools.
The PDF slides are available here:
https://dconf.org/2023/slides/shah_an...
Mike's YouTube channel
/ mikeshah
The students' project
https://github.com/abstewart/DRaw
DConf '23 Homepage
https://dconf.org/2023/index.html
The D Programming Language Home
https://dlang.org/
#dlang #dconf #programming
TIMECODES:
00:00 Teaching with D: Introduction
00:56 The software engineering course
02:28 Problems in Mike's previous course iterations
08:35 Ruminations on using D for the course
12:40 Introducing D in the course
16:27 Curriculum and assignments
18:26 Where students struggled and excelled
21:01 Fall 2023 improvements
22:13 Course postmortem
25:29 Why Mike will continue teaching with D at university
26:31 The next presentation
26:50 Learning with D: Introduction (Andrew Briasco-Stewart)
28:03 Initial student reactions
28:49 Learning D from scratch
30:31 Takeaways from initial steps
31:58 The project (Elizabeth Williams)
37:30 Good development practices (Steven Abbot)
40:13 What could be improved
43:35 What they loved (Ben Mallet)
47:13 D features they didn't touch
49:13 Wrap up
50:25 Moving forward
51:36 Comment about code coverage projects
52:21 Q: Is Mike recording his class lectures?
53:15 Q about D learning resources
54:07 Q: Are written or video tutorials more digestible?
57:26 Q: Why is testing so far down in the curriculum?
58:24 Q: Has learning D enabled them to better use other languages?
58:09 Q about other languages and using D in the future