Re: Looking for a good Ada 95 book

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
>In article <dewar.848785112@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

>In my experience, even _professors_ who do not teach first-term courses
>underestimate the difficulty of doing so, and overestimate what can be
>taught. First-year (and even first-term) courses are, these days, being
>heaped with all kinds of stuff so that the students are "prepared" for
>all successor courses.

>We are doing this because we both think it's important to build the
>right foundation under the students' education. We may have our
>differences on some of the details, but (I think) we're quite in
>sync on the underlying fundamentals.

I would greatly value the opinions of the two of you as to what _should_
be taught in CS1.  In this department, I'm on record as saying that I
would be perfectly happy if students didn't learn about pointers at all
in 1st year (or OOP), but wish that the students _were_ taught the
elements of Polya-style problem solving and more particularly of _testing_.

The reason why I'd dearly love to see "How-to-solve-it" approaches
and testing taught in first year is that these are skills the students
_need_ in first year as well as in all the other years that follow.

(Oh yes, and remedial English.  Did I need to say that?)

-- 
Mixed Member Proportional---a *great* way to vote!
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.