Ada experience in the undergraduate curriculum
Communications of the ACM
A C-based graphics library for CS1
SIGCSE '95 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Transitioning to Ada in an introductory course for non-majors
Proceedings of the conference on TRI-Ada '97
Animation, visualization, and interaction in CS 1 assignments
SIGCSE '98 Proceedings of the twenty-ninth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Computer science and general education: Java, graphics, and the Web
SIGCSE '99 The proceedings of the thirtieth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Using lab practica to evaluate programming ability
Proceedings of the thirty-second SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer Science Education
Assessing the ripple effect of CS1 language choice
CCSC '00 Proceedings of the fourteenth annual consortium on Small Colleges Southeastern conference
An introduction to TCL/TK: the best language for introduction to computer science courses
CCSC '00 Proceedings of the fourteenth annual consortium on Small Colleges Southeastern conference
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University requirements for the material covered in introductory computer science courses have evolved over the years, and those courses must therefore evolve as well. In this paper, we discuss the 7-year evolution of such a course at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In 1995, the main thrust of the course was to develop students' programming skills to support later programming activities, even for those students not majoring in computer science. Although some general survey topics were covered, programming skill development was the main goal of the course. Since that time, the course has evolved significantly into a course that covers general computer science and Information Technology (IT) topics in greater depth and breadth, with a continuing but greatly reduced programming component. During that 7-year period, we changed programming languages for the course, significantly changed the way in which we evaluated programming ability, incorporated graphics into the course, conducted an extensive rework of the course content, and made numerous smaller changes as well. In this paper, we discuss the technical and political issues associated with the evolution of the course. Although this work is presented in the context of our course, such evolution is clearly applicable to other introductory courses as well.