Re: Looking for a good Ada 95 book

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <57gpd3$1ri$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>,
Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> wrote:

[snip]

Ah, now some _substance_ in this discussion!

>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_.

It's getting a bit off-topic for CLA, but what the heck; we have lots
of off-topic stuff here.:-)

If I were able to design an entire curriculum from scratch, I'd go
along with you here. Unfortunately, many of us don't have that luxury.
Every time we think of deleting a topic from the first year, we have to
get our colleagues' agreement on where that topic _will_ be taught. In
my experience, that sort of coordination is very hard to achieve in a
faculty of more than a few members.

So I've tended to stick pretty close to "classical" CS1 and CS2, with
the addition of a bunch more "software engineering" stuff (well, I guess
you could call it SE...:-)) instead of traditional monolithic Pascal
style. Even this has some costs. I have a feeling that I'll catch hell
from a colleague this year, because I added some more OO-ish (inheritance)
content to my CS2 course, which made me skip my usual 2.5 hours on
hash tables.

You might want to check a couple of URLs for some discussion on this
issue. I was on a SIGCSE panel in March that discussed the first
year without reference to specific languages. I laid out my "vision"
of the first year in a set of viewgraphs at

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

Among these viewgraphs are a couple that summarize "classical" CS1/CS2.

The overall panel, which gives others' positions and some other sets
of viewgraphs is at

http://www.cs.duke.edu/~ola/slides/lang96.html

>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.

Agreed; I'm going to think about whether I can do this without too
much diminution of the time I spend on other _expected_ topics.

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

CSAB accreditation criteria over here require that CS programs focus
specifically on written and verbal expression skills. For details, see

http://www.acm.org/~csab

I guess in Australia you have similar problems to ours - often our 
foreign students speak and write better English (even if the syntax 
is not always right) than the native born.:-)

Mike Feldman