Engaging high school students in computer science via challenging applications

Authors:
Giuseppe Maggiore;Andrea Torsello;Flavio Sartoretto;Agostino Cortesi
Affiliations:
Universitá Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Venice, Italy;Universitá Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Venice, Italy;Universitá Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Venice, Italy;Universitá Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Venice, Italy
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2011 conference on Information technology education
Year:
2011

Citing 10
Cited 0

The risks and benefits of teaching purely functional programming in first year

Journal of Functional Programming
Teaching Computer Science through Game Design

Computer
The structure and interpretation of the computer science curriculum

Journal of Functional Programming
Game programming in introductory courses with direct state manipulation

ITiCSE '05 Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
A games first approach to teaching introductory programming

Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Game-themed programming assignments: the faculty perspective

Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
The impact of game design on students' interest in CS

GDCSE '08 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Game development in computer science education
Assessing game-themed programming assignments for CS1/2 courses

GDCSE '08 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Game development in computer science education
A functional I/O system or, fun for freshman kids

Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
Computer games and traditional CS courses

Communications of the ACM - Finding the Fun in Computer Science Education

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper we describe a general framework for building short-courses designed to engage student while presenting a sub-field of computer science. We also describe two of these short-courses centered around computer graphics and physical simulations. We will discuss how even beginner students can participate in our short-courses; this is possible thanks to a careful choice of development environment, programming language and libraries that allow the students to focus on solving the problems and not thinking about low-level details.