From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,abd120a1d5231d28 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) Subject: Re: Looking for a good Ada 95 book Date: 1996/11/27 Message-ID: <57i82b$oj4@felix.seas.gwu.edu>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 201097237 references: <3290C33B.1772@cse.eng.lmu.edu> <57cofr$mgf@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <57gpd3$1ri$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> organization: George Washington University newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-11-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <57gpd3$1ri$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>, Richard A. O'Keefe 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