Have students decompose problems in a more structured way by acting as project managers who need to build teams (of methods and classes) and divide the work amongst them in a clearly organized manner.

  • In this activity teams refer to collections of methods and classes and team members refer to methods and classes that have a specific role to play in achieving the team goals.
  • To come up with relevant teams and team members, students must think about the work that needs to be done before writing code.
    • Each team member should have an very specific role that contributes to the solution of the problem.
  • When students have an idea for a team member, have them write a short description for what that member’s responsibility is.
    • A description should be 2-3 words.
      • If students need more than 1 sentence to describe a team member’s role, the role is not specific enough. That means they need to break this role up amongst more, specific team members.
  • The goal in creating teams and team members is to avoid having one team member do all or most of the work.
    • Each team member should only to a small amount of work before passing the work off to another team member.
      • As such, team members should never handle work that isn’t central to their role.

More about this tip

External Source
Interview with Cynthia Lee