This page aims to serves as a resource for a diverse community of
individuals who are interested in elementary patterns, patterns at a
level appropriate for students just learning to design and write programs.
It contains links to people interested in this topic, and to relevant
patterns, pattern languages, and papers.
What's new?
This web page originally grew out of the Elementary Patterns and their Role in Instruction workshop at ChiliPLoP'98. There we focused on pattern languages for use in the first year of academic computer science instruction. Others have broader interests in elementary patterns, and I'm not even sure if, and to what extent, our demarcation of boundaries is meaningful. As a result, I intend for this web page to appeal to a very broad definition of elementary patterns and of teaching and learning. The community may well evolve toward a better understanding over time.
On this page, you will find...
In addition to the participation in the broader patterns community (see the patterns home page), become active in the following ways:
We maintain a simple archive of Elementary Patterns mailing list, starting with messages of March 11, 1999, for those interested in reviewing past traffic on the list.
These papers either document elementary patterns that might work for relative novices or document ideas appropriate for novices that could be re-worked into an elementary pattern language.
My most recent patterns work has been to study functional programming patterns. Much of this work so far has been at the elementary-patterns level, though I hope to take it farther.
These patterns and pattern languages have not yet been workshopped or are still in aggressive development. The authors would appreciate comments that would lead to better patterns in the next versions.
Papers in this section discuss issues involved in using patterns as a teaching tool in the classroom, especially opportunities and challenges:
These works, while not strictly patterns or about patterns, contain ideas of interest to people working on elementary patterns: