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From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)
Subject: More on Ada 95 Textbooks
Date: 1996/11/23
Message-ID: <5775k5$bok@felix.seas.gwu.edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 198277967
organization: George Washington University
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-11-23T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


An especially welcome trend in textbook publishing is the increasing 
use of the Internet to distribute information and supplementary 
materials.

Here are a few URLs that might interest CLA readers. 


  * * * * *

http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/spider

A sequence of sections from the Feldman/Koffman text, showing one
"continuing saga" of text sections and projects that runs through
the book from Chapter 3 to Chapter 16. 

This series can be thought of as yet another reincrnation of turtle 
graphics; the nice thing about it is that - in addition to helping 
beginners visualize the behavior of control structures - its 
implementation is simple, so that students nearing the end of just 
one 3-credit course can understand it. It's also portable, using only
an ANSI-compatible screen driver. 

There's also a bit of computer graphics fundamentals here, especially
coordinate transformation. When we discuss this in my course, students
often ask about whether we can do computer graphics in Ada. "Of course,"
I tell them, "Spider _is_ computer graphics. We could use a more
elaborate high-resolution color screen, but that's just details."

  * * * * *

http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/cs1-im

The nearly complete "instructor's manual" (IM) for this text. We are putting
this on the Web to avoid killing trees and to update it dynamically.
It contains a lot of philosophical and "helpful hints" material. 

The IM really has a visible part and a private part.:-) The private part 
is a set of problem and project solutions I'll be finishing over the winter
break. These will be stored in the publisher's password-protected 
ftp area; educators using the book can get the password from AW.

I welcome suggestions from students, other educators, and the community
on the public IM. 

I'm also preparing to put my course project assignments (not the solutions!)
in the website; I encourage others to do the same.

  * * * * *

http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/book-cd

Details of the book-CD package formerly known as "Academic Ada."

  * * * * *

http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/concurrency

The concurrent programming chapter from "Software Construction and
Data Structures with Ada 95."

  * * * * *

ftp://ftp.gwu.edu/pub/ada/courses

The program distributions from my intro and data structures texts.
These are identical to the programs in the books.

  * * * * *

http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/papers/sigcse96.html

This is the set of viewgraphs I used in a panel talk at the 1996
SIGCSE conference. This panel, organized by Owen Astrachan of Duke,
was entitled "The First Year Beyond Language", and was a (IMHO very
successful) attempt to get beyond the intro-course language wars,
and discuss what unites rather than divides us. 

Each of 6 panelists uses a different first-course language, but was 
forbidden to identify the language until all panelists had given their 
talks. My presentation gave a view that was, of course, consistent 
with using Ada 95 as an intro language, but we were all quite pleased
to find that, overall, quite a bit unites us. Especially gratifying
was the overall emphasis on projects rather than just code, software
engineering (in a manner of speaking) rather than just programs, and
inculcating an "object" mindset in the students.

  * * * * *

Enjoy. Comments welcome (but not about the uppercase reserved words!).

Mike Feldman