Learning to program = learning to construct mechanisms and explanations
Communications of the ACM
Supporting Pascal programming with an on-line template library and case studies
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
Design patterns: an essential component of CS curricula
SIGCSE '98 Proceedings of the twenty-ninth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Communications of the ACM - Self managed systems
Reduction -- an abstract thinking pattern: the case of the computational models course
Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Pattern-oriented instruction and its influence on problem decomposition and solution construction
Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
A goal/plan analysis of buggy pascal programs
Human-Computer Interaction
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Composition is a fundamental problem solving heuristic. In computer science, it primarily appears in program design with concrete objects such as language constructs. It also appears in more abstract forms in higher-level courses. One such form is that of language concatenation in the Computational Models course. This concatenation involves the composition of two specifications of infinite sets (source languages) into a third one, and requires both abstraction and non-deterministic conception. In this paper, we illuminate behaviors of advanced high school students, with such composition. Students who encountered difficulties offered pseudo solutions, which enclosed only "surface" features and observations. We orderly display their solutions, discuss them, and offer suggestions for educators to cope with this phenomenon.