CS 0.5: a better approach to introductory computer science for majors

  • Authors:

  • Robert H. Sloan;Patrick Troy

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA;University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

There are often problems when students enter a course with widely different experience levels with key course topics. If the material is covered too slowly, those with greater experience get bored and lose interest. If the material is covered too quickly, those with less experience get lost and feel incompetent. This problem with incoming students of our Computer Science Major led us to create CS 0.5: an introductory Computer Science course to target those CS majors who have little or no background with programming. Our goal is to provide these students with an engaging curriculum and prepare them to keep pace in future courses with those students who enter with a stronger background. Following the lead of Mark Guzdial's work on using media computation for non-majors at Georgia Tech, we use media computation as the tool to provide this engaging curriculum. We report here on our experience to date using the CS 0.5 approach with a media computation course.