Four Patterns in Concert

For assignment 6, I decided to model a class of 4 students and a lecturing professor. The students observe the professor, who has 2 states: OnTopicState and OnTangentState.

When the professor is on topic, the students use the strategy pattern to set their listen() behavior to AttentiveStrategy and uses a System.out.println to print what the student is doing (taking notes, listening, or distracted).

When the professor is on a tangent, the students have their listen() behavior set to SpaceOutStrategy which can make the student print out that they are sleeping, doodling, browsing the internet, daydreaming, or paying attention and amused.

The students are decorated with Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior, which have info() methods that return a String with the students name and class.

A standard class period in my program is 50 minutes long and the professor will pick a random amount of time between 1 and 25 minutes to either be on topic or on a tangent before the state is switched. When the class timer reaches 0, the class is dismissed and the students leave.

I decided that my console output was pretty boring when I finished implementing the patterns, so I added String arrays so that the teacher would lecture on different topics and go on tangent about different things similar to how I made the students have several options for their listen() behaviors.

I had a lot of fun with this project and feel like I can now go back to my more complicated project with a better idea of how to compose patterns and not let all the details obscure the implementation.