Technical Section: High-level application development for non-computer science majors using image processing

  • Authors:

  • Amit Shesh

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Technology, Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA

  • Venue:
  • Computers and Graphics
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

It is a unique challenge to teach programming and application development to students pursuing an IT degree other than computer science. Using simple visual computing as a medium to teach programming can be very helpful in such situations as it enables programmes that produce pictures rather than raw text and data. This paper describes a semester-long experience of using image processing as the theme in a course to teach programming and program design to students of information systems. Students progressively built a fairly complete image processing application from scratch in a bottom-up fashion using Java. They first concentrated on using low-level constructs like arrays and implemented several operations on them, and then supplemented their programs with features like a GUI complete with ''undo-redo'' features and capabilities to handle most standard image file formats. Not only did this approach satisfy all the objectives of a typical programming course but also enabled students to develop meaningful applications from scratch with ''standard'' features. Our classroom was composed of a mix of undergraduate and graduate students lacking sufficient programming background. A comparative analysis shows improvement in student performance when using image processing rather than not. With minor variations, our approach can be fit to courses for other majors where programming is considered useful but not critical.