Object-Oriented Design Course Descriptor

Course Summary

This course offers students an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the concepts and practice of program design: learn how to design and codify software components using object-oriented design principles and, more generally, best programming practices. The course equips students with practical program design skills via case studies in modern software libraries and hands-on coding sessions in Java and/or Python.

In this course, students will learn how to represent data and methods that manipulate that data using classes (or objects); and how to use object-oriented design patterns to design and implement more complex compositions.

This course is suitable for graduate students of disciplines other than computing who are keen to acquire new (or deepen existing) knowledge of programming.

Course Aims

The aims of this course are to:

• Become a good programmer: design, debug and test your software solutions.
• Consistently write good programs: correct, clear, well-structured, and well-documented.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and Understanding

Subject Specific Skills

Transferable and Professional Skills

Teaching and Learning

Teaching and learning strategies for this course will include: 

• 15 (10 x 1.5) hours of full-cohort lectures
• 15 (10 x 1.5) hours of lab sessions 
• 20 (10 x 2) office hours 

There will be one lecture and one lab session per teaching week, 1¹/₂ hours each. Lab sessions give students the opportunity to work on their (formative and summative) assignments with the help of the course leader and teaching assistants.

Course information and supplementary materials are available on the University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

Students are required to attend and participate in all the formal and timetabled sessions for this course. Students are also expected to manage their directed learning and independent study in support of the course.

Employability Skills

• Communication skills
• Presentation skills
• Programming skills

Assessment

Formative

Students will be formatively assessed during the course by means of set assignments. These do not count towards the end of year results but will provide students with developmental feedback. Set assignments will also amplify problem-solving skills and develop software components that form part of the coding assignments.

Summative

Assessment will be in the form of coding assignments, which the student will have to do to the set guidelines for coding:

The coding assignments will be assessed in accordance with the assessment aims set out in the Programme Specification.

Feedback

Students will receive formal feedback in a variety of ways: written (including via email correspondence); oral (on an ad hoc basis) and indirectly through discussion during group tutorials. Students will also attend the formal meeting, Collections, in which they will receive constructive and developmental feedback on their  performance. 

Feedback is provided on summative written assignments which will be handed back to the students.

Indicative Reading

Note: Comprehensive and current reading lists for courses are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative reading list provided below is used as part of the approval/modification process only.

Books

Matthias Felleisen, Robert B. Findler, Matthew Flatt and Shriram Krishnamurthi. 2014. How to Design Programs (2^nd ed.). The MIT Press. Available online at https://htdp.org

Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra and Elisabeth Robson. 2004. Head-First Design Patterns: A Brian-Friendly Guide. O’Reilly Media

Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides. 1994. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison Wesley

Perdita Stevens. 2020. How to Write Good Programs: A Guide for Students. Cambridge University Press

Indicative Topics

Students will study the following topics: 

• Representing (complex) data with objects
• Representing data collections with objects
• Equality and comparison between objects
• How to test programs
• Composing programs with the model-view-controller architecture
• Code reuse via inheritance and composition
• Program design patterns (e.g. the adapter, strategy, decorator, visitor, factory and builder design pattern)