Problem based learning with technological support in an AI subject: description and evaluation
Proceedings of the 2nd Australasian conference on Computer science education
Scheme and Java in the first year
CCSC '00 Proceedings of the fifth annual CCSC northeastern conference on The journal of computing in small colleges
Communications of the ACM - Self managed systems
Successful approaches to teaching introductory computer science courses with python
Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Python as a first language: pre-conference workshop
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges - Papers of the twelfth annual CCSC Northeastern Conference
Easing up on the introductory computer science syllabus: a shift from syntax to concepts
Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference companion on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
After completing a pilot study using the Python programming language to transition to Java within our first-year introductory programming sequence, our department opted to make a more radical change. We assert that our students are better served in their first year of study by a focus on problems in computer science and their solutions, rather than programming. Our new introductory sequence emphasizes algorithm development and analysis, object-oriented design, and testing. As in our pilot, programming is first done in Python, switching to Java when object-oriented design and static typing become advantageous. Students reported liking the problem focus of the courses, while the distribution of grades remained similar to those in previous years. As a result, our department will be discontinuing our earlier introductory sequence, and offering the new problem-based one to all the groups of students our department services beginning in Fall 2010.