Expanding CS1: applications across the liberal arts

Journal of Computing …, 2010

digital) is published at least six times per year and constitutes the refereed papers of regional conferences sponsored by the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges.

2004

Abstract A discussion took place on the SIGCSE mailing list in late March of 2004 that raised important issues on how to teach introductory courses using Java. This article attempts to summarize several of the important points raised during this discussion, among them whether or how objects should be taught early or late in a CS 1 course, or indeed, whether object-oriented languages should be postponed until a second course.

2010

Abstract Thirty-one years ago, the ACM Computing Curricula used the terms" CS1" and" CS2" to designate the first two two courses in the introductory sequence of a computer science major. While computer science education has greatly changed since that time, we still refer to introduction to programming courses as CS1 and basic data structures courses as CS2. This common shorthand is then used to enable students to transfer between institutions and as a base of many research studies.

Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education - SIGCSE '05, 2005

As Computer Science educators, we know that students learn more from projects that are fun and challenging, that seem "real" to them, and that allow them to be creative in designing their solutions. When we have students beating down our office doors wanting to show us what they've done, we know we have designed a project that truly meets its pedagogical goals. In CS1 courses, it is often difficult to come up with large, real-world programming projects that are at an appropriate level and that really excite students. This is particularly true in the first half of the course when students are learning basic programming and problem solving skills. We found that assignments based on image processing are an effective way to teach many CS1 topics. Because students enjoy working on the projects, they come away with a solid understanding of the topics reinforced by the projects. In this paper, we discuss many ways in which image processing could be used to teach CS1 topics. As an example, we present two image processing projects that we use in our CS1 course. These large, real-world programs are designed so that students can successfully master them early in their first semester of programming. Even though our CS1 course is taught using the C programming language, these projects could easily be used by a CS1 course in C, C++, or Java. We provide starting point code for Java and C versions of the projects, and provide sample assignment write-ups on our project webpage .

Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education - ITiCSE-WGR '04, 2004

A discussion took place on the SIGCSE mailing list in late March of 2004 that raised important issues on how to teach introductory courses using Java. This article attempts to summarize several of the important points raised during this discussion, among them whether or how objects should be taught early or late in a CS 1 course, or indeed whether object-oriented languages should be postponed until a second course.

2000

The Computing Alliance of Hispanic Serving Institutions (http://cahsi.fiu.edu), a consortium of 7 institutions focused on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Hispanics in computing, is implementing and promoting the development of recruitment mechanisms to attract other majors to the field of Computer Science. CS has lost roughly 50% of its majors in the last 5 years. The member institutions have

Computing science and …, 2003

Multi-language, multi-thread, multi-paradigm, net-centric programming is becoming widely used. Our teaching of programming has to adapt to the requirements of these new directions. How can we do that without an explosion in required course-hours? This WG explores a concepts first approach to introductory programming courses that attempts to describe important ideas not simply in terms of a particular programming language but rather in terms that will permit the student to gracefully work with multiple programming paradigms. The paradigms appear naturally depending on which concepts are used for the problem being solved. The student is able to situate the paradigms in a more general framework that shows their relationships and how to use them together. We discuss one way in which concepts first may be taught based on the kernel language hierarchy and its implementation as a subset of the programming language Oz [10]. We also discuss how concepts first may be introduced in situations where Java or a similar OO language is the base language. We comment on the impact of concepts first on existing courses and problem solving methodology. We are proposing here an additional ingredient in freshman teaching, namely, language-independent concept descriptions. This approach has yet to be tried at the freshman level. Hence, we have no evidence that what we propose will make a difference. Nevertheless, we are hopeful that it will make a difference.

ABSTRACT Literature on women in computing point out that computer science is not being effective at attracting and retaining women. Introduction to Media Computation is a new CS1 aimed especially at non-majors which was designed explicitly to address the concerns of women in computer science, such as the lack of relevance and creativity. The course is contextualized around the theme of manipulating and creating media.

2002

Several weaknesses have been identified to the programming-first approach often used in introductory computer science courses. Despite these weaknesses, programming continues to be the central focus in CS1 for many institutions. This paper proposes a concept-first approach that can be integrated into existing programming-first curriculum.

2005

Two issues of related interest are investigated in this paper. The first issue is associated with the statement that "Learning to program is a key objective in most introductory computing courses, yet many computing educators have voiced concern over whether their students are learning the necessary programming skills in those courses" (McCracken et al. 2001). The second issue considers which task CS1 students find more difficult: code generation or code comprehension. To investigate this, we analysed our CS1 course results in terms of laboratory exercises, comprehension, generation, factual/conceptual, and multiple-choice exam questions. Contrary to our initial expectations, the code comprehension and generation skills of our students appear to be tracking each other.