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Educators' Symposium

Chair: Eugene Wallingford, University of Northern Iowa, edu_symp@oopsla.org

• Overview
• Important Dates
• Submission Guidelines
• Submission Categories
• Submission Process
• Educator Scholarships
• For More Information
• Program Committee

Overview

Join us at OOPSLA's 13th Educators' Symposium, the premier forum for object-oriented (OO) educators and trainers!

This one-day symposium offers a venue for educators and trainers to share their experiences teaching object-oriented technology and to explore ideas that can help us understand and teach OO technology better.

It achieves these goals via a number of avenues, including featured talks, paper presentations, activity sessions, demonstrations, posters, and group discussions.

Important Dates

Submission due date: March 19, 2004
Notification of decision: May 7, 2004
Deadline for camera-ready copy: August 2, 2004

Submission Guidelines

OOPSLA invites educators and trainers from all levels of academia and industry to submit papers and proposals in any area relevant to OO education and training, including but not limited to:

• teaching techniques
• understanding how students learn
• use of educational materials such as software
• use of agile development approaches in courses
• facilitating a learning organization
• facilitating active learning

The Educators' Symposium's program committee will evaluate all submissions. The committee comprises members from academia and industry with extensive experience teaching OO technology. The committee will base its decisions on the following criteria:

• potential value to OO trainers and educators,
• clarity,
• technical and educational merit, and
• originality.

Ultimately, the committee's focus will be on ideas that others attending the symposium can use to improve how their students learn.

Submission Categories

The program committee solicits a variety of submissions that can help OO educators and trainers do their jobs better.

Feel free to contact the symposium chair to request clarification or to propose a type of submission not listed here.

• Traditional submissions
• Nifty assignments
• Informal submissions

Traditional submissions

Submissions in the following categories have been contributed successfully to past symposia:

• An experience paper that discusses a challenge encountered teaching in an academic or industrial setting and how the instructor addressed that challenge.
• A research paper that reports a contribution to knowledge in the field of OO education and training.
• A proposal for a panel that discusses a topic of current interest from several viewpoints

Nifty assignments

This year, the committee especially seeks submissions that describe nifty assignments for teaching a particular OO topic. A nifty assignment is one of those gems that helps students learn an important skill or idea in a fun, challenging way. It is general enough to be adapted for use at different schools and with different programming languages. At the same time, many nifty assignments permit students to go beyond the bounds of the assignment to deepen their understanding in unexpected ways.

To submit a nifty assignment, send a .zip file containing a web directory. This directory should contain:

• An index.html file that presents the following information:
  • a 1- to 3-sentence description of the assignment
  • information about the assignment, for other instructors:
    • a description of what makes it so nifty
    • the target course or audience for the assignment
    • the idea or skill it teaches
    • the length of time students typically work on it
    • the prerequisite material it assumes
    • a description of difficulties that the instructor must watch for when using the assignment
  • links to support materials for the assignment
• The instructional materials of the assignment
  • the assignment handout given to students (html, pdf, or rtf)
  • support materials, such as
    • starter and support code files given to students
    • sample data files
    • an executable demo application

The program committee will evaluate the quality of the nifty assignment and its applicability to the OOPSLA education community, not the details of the presentation at this stage.

Informal submissions

Finally, less formal submissions might include:

• A report of another 2003-2004 OO education/training event, such as a workshop, working group, or conference during the year, even at OOPSLA 2004.
• A proposal for a poster or demonstration that shares a technique or resource with the OOPSLA community.

Depending on other activities accepted to the symposium, less formal submissions may be accepted only for display at the symposium, but not presentation; attendees will be able to meet and talk with to presenters during breaks.

Submission Process

Go to the Educators' Symposium submission system.

All submissions will be made through the OOPSLA online submission system. The online submission system will open January 26, 2004. Other submissions cannot be accepted.

Each submission must include a title, the type of submission, and the author's name, affiliation, and contact information (e-mail, phone, fax).

All papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format. If you do not have access to a program that produces PDF, then you may arrange with the chair to submit in PostScript format. However, this should be a last resort. Note that MS Word documents must be converted to PDF before being submitted.

Final camera-ready papers must be formatted to conform to ACM Proceedings requirements: Nine-point font on ten-point baseline; two columns per page, each column 3.33 inches wide by 9 inches tall, with a column gutter of 0.33 inches; etc. We strongly encourage you to use this layout for your initial submission, too. See the ACM Proceedings Guidelines for more information. You can save preparation time by using one of the templates from that page.

Educator Scholarships