Logic in first courses for computer science majors

Education and Information Technologies, 2014

Designing and deploying programming courses is undoubtedly a challenging task. In this paper, an attempt to analyze important aspects of a sequence of two courses on imperative-procedural and object-oriented programming in a non-CS majors Department is made. This analysis is based on a questionnaire filled in by fifty students in a voluntary basis. The issues of the programming courses that are investigated refer to: the strategy selected for the introduction to programming; the sequence of the programming techniques and languages taught and the transition from the one to the other; students' difficulties with programming in general and with imperative-procedural and object-oriented programming in specific; the teaching and learning design of both courses; and the material that students rely on for learning programming. Based on the analysis of students' replies on the questionnaire, related work and the instructor's experience on teaching the courses, conclusions are drawn regarding all the aforementioned aspects of designing and deploying programming courses. The main contribution of the paper is the fact that all the important and interrelated aspects of a sequence of two programming courses are investigated in conjunction, providing realistic implications and guidelines for improving the quality and effectiveness of existing programming courses and designing and deploying new courses. The main results refer to the usage of a pseudo-language for an introduction to programming, the transition from procedural to object-oriented programming, the intrinsic difficulties of learning programming, and practices for a more successful teaching and learning design of programming courses. Keywords: Programming course design; teaching and learning programming; procedural programming; object-oriented programming; pedagogy 2004). The imperative-first and functional-first strategies were heavily used for decades, while the objects-first strategy attracted teachers' attention the last decade. For a long period of time extended research was carried out regarding the best choice of strategy for an introduction to programming with main opponents the imperative-first and objects-first strategy. Although, the results of the relevant studies are contradictory the majority of researchers seem to agree that students face more difficulties during their transition from imperative-procedural programming to object-oriented programming and not vice versa ). Some of the difficulties faced by students -with prior experience on an imperative-procedural language -during their introduction to OOP are the following: although the OO problem solving technique is considered more natural, it demands a new way of thinking that cannot be easily acquired by students with experience on problem solving with a procedural language (Tempte, 1991); students find it difficult to use correctly OOP concepts and tend to treat methods as procedures, ignoring their role in OOP (Handjerrouit, 1998; Handjerrouit, 1999). On the other hand, other researchers state that object-oriented languages demand knowledge of basic programming structures and characteristics and capabilities prior to using an OOP language . It is obvious that deciding what strategy to rely on for the introduction to programming is not an easy and straightforward decision. Moreover, in the case of a series of programming courses decisions have to be made regarding the overall strategies, or else what programming techniques will be taught and with what sequence. The next step is selecting a programming language that supports the selected strategy and meets the goals of the course and the program of studies. The available programming languages are numerous and selecting the one that will be used is a multicriteria decision. Researchers have proposed lists of criteria , key features and suggestions (Kaplan, 2010) for supporting teachers in selecting the first programming language. One of the most extensive list of criteria has been proposed by and includes the following criteria: software cost; programming language acceptance in academia; programming language industry penetration; software characteristics; student-friendly features; language pedagogical features; language intent; language design; language paradigm; language support and required training; and student experience. go a step beyond these usual considerations proposed as selection criteria Xinogalos, S. (2014). Designing and deploying programming courses: Strategies, tools, difficulties and pedagogy.

Journal of Engineering Education, 1998

A teaching reform initiative, started in the spring semester of 1993 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), is described. The program seeks to increase student success in a freshman computer science course, and ultimately in the entire NJIT curriculum. The traditional teaching methods where the teacher presided over a lecture session supplying facts and figures, providing ideas, and presenting problems and their solutions, has been altered. The new learning environment described in this paper aims to create an all‐inclusive setting inviting the students to make the transformation from passive learners to active participants. Rather than merely listening to lectures, students formulate problems and devise their own approaches to answering questions and finding solutions. Such a teaching/learning methodology requires instructional redesign and role redefinition. The presentation of class material is reordered as the teacher and students cross each other's confines becom...

University requirements for the material covered in introductory computer science courses have evolved over the years, and those courses must therefore evolve as well. In this paper, we discuss the 7-year evolution of such a course at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In 1995, the main thrust of the course was to develop students' programming skills to support later programming activities, even for those students not majoring in computer science. Although some general survey topics were covered, programming skill development was the main goal of the course. Since that time, the course has evolved significantly into a course that covers general computer science and Information Technology (IT) topics in greater depth and breadth, with a continuing but greatly reduced programming component. During that 7-year period, we changed programming languages for the course, significantly changed the way in which we evaluated programming ability, incorporated graphics into the course, conducted an...

Journal of Computing …, 2011

One of the main challenges students in introductory programming courses face is learning the syntax of a particular programming language, such as C++ or Java, while they simultaneously try to understand the fundamental logic of programming constructs. Visual Logic© (www.visuallogic.org) is an interactive, graphical, flowchart tool that can be used to address this challenge. In this paper, we present three different courses, developed independently at three different colleges, using Visual Logic with completely different approaches. The first course is a General Education CS course introducing algorithmic thinking. The second is a CS0 course which uses Visual Logic for six weeks and then transitions to Python. The third course is a CS1 course which uses Visual Logic as a tool to teach programming concepts and to brainstorm solutions. Visual Logic is not taught separately, but integrated with the various Java control structures. Once students gain an understanding of basic programming logic concepts, the transition to a programming language such as Python or Java, in the same course or the next course, is often much easier for them. Though these are different approaches in three different courses, using Visual Logic has shown an increase in the interest level of the students and enhanced their learning.

Proceedings of the 1st Conference, 1996

Computer science as a discipline is changing rapidly. New developments in software and hardware are changing the way we write programs, design systems, and create applications. The role of the first year curriculum in computer science is to lay the foundations for becoming a professional in the field. We examine the ways in which the changing nature of computer science influences our teaching methods, our view of which concepts are fundamental, and the overall sense of what it takes to become a successful computer scientist. We propose a first year curriculum model that has a strong emphasis on design, on programming in a structured project based environment, and on the extensive use of tools, libraries, and templates. We illustrate this model by describing a collection of graphicsbased exercises that apply computing across the disciplines.