The Pedagogical Patterns Project

Last update: - January 13th, 1999 -

The process of training, retraining, and, most of all, educating people in object technology is an ongoing challenge which has many unanswered questions. While many good pedagogical ideas are presented at OO conferences and published in proceedings and journals each year, very little has been done to collate the effective practices of many OO educators into one publication. The purpose of the pedagogical patterns project is do just that, to create a publication which is similar to what Susan Lilly (in 1/96 Object Magazine) refers to as "reusable pedagogical design patterns" .

According to Lilly, a pedagogical pattern should be repeatable and easy to adapt. Each pattern should be described in a way that allows it to be easily "instantiated" for different lessons by different instructors. However, patterns do not need to be new or original. Lilly compares this to the Gamma et al. "Design Patterns" book, as follows:

"The largest contribution of the 'Gang of Four' book is the documentation of patterns that have been proven to work, not the invention of the solutions. What makes patterns useful is their ability to communicate proven solutions to common problems."

Most of the pattern ideas on this web page (many in first version) have been collected as part of three workshops held at ECOOP'96 (in Linz, Austria), TOOLS USA '96 (in Santa Barbara, California), and OOPSLA'96 (in San Jose, California). In addition, potential patterns were collected during a fourth workshop, held at the OT'97 conference this past April in Oxford, England. There was also a large amount of interest generated after a short Educators' Symposium presentation and Birds-of-a-Feather session held this October at the OOPSLA'97 conference.

The project leaders met at the end of November in Argentina to spend a week working on analyzing and categorizing the individual patterns, drafting a more useful format for the patterns, and making plans for the remainder of the project.
Two of the leaders then attended the ChiliPLoP (patterns languages) conference in March to get further guidance on the project. In April, the fifth pedagogical patterns workshop was held at the OT'98 conference in England.