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Toolkits in first year computer science: a pedagogical imperative

Author:

Richard RasalaAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCSE '00: Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education

Pages 185 - 191

https://doi.org/10.1145/330908.331852

Published: 01 March 2000 Publication History

Abstract

Traditional first year computer science courses teach the principles of computing using the basic features of some chosen programming language such as C, C++, Java, Ada, Scheme, Eiffel, etc. Abstraction and encapsulation focus on entities such as algorithms, functions, data structures, classes, objects, and closures that can be built directly on top of the raw language. If a facility such as windows and graphics is not directly available in the language then it is not used. This means that student exercises tend to look inward at computer science issues rather than outward to the exciting applications that show the breadth and power of computing.

The fundamental thesis of this article is that teaching students in the framework of powerful toolkits is essential to maintain student interest and is pedagogically important precisely because toolkits are a rich source of examples that illustrate the principles of computation. We hope to convince computer science faculty that the use of toolkits is imperative in a modern first year curriculum.

We will first discuss in general why toolkits are important. We will spice this discussion with some simple illustrations and with references to the use of toolkits by faculty at other institutions.

We will then describe the toolkits we have developed at Northeastern University and explain both what they do and why they are pedagogically valuable. We will see how toolkits enable students to do more interesting and effective work and how principles of design and algorithms can be demonstrated by the key components of the toolkits.

We will conclude with some general remarks and explain why the arguments made against toolkits do not have sufficient weight to change our conclusions. We will also give the web site address where our toolkits are available.

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Index Terms

Toolkits in first year computer science: a pedagogical imperative
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education
      2. Model curricula
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Software implementation planning
        Software design techniques
    2. Software development process management

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCSE '00: Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education

May 2000

429 pages

ISBN:1581132131

DOI:10.1145/330908

Chairmen:
Boots Cassel,
Nell Dale,
Henry Walker,
Editor:
Susan Haller

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin Volume 32, Issue 1
Mar. 2000
429 pages
ISSN:0097-8418
DOI:10.1145/331795
Editor:
John Impagliazzo
Hofstra Univ., Hemstead, NY
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2000 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGCSE: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 01 March 2000

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SIGCSE00: The SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

March 7 - 12, 2000

Texas, Austin, USA

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SIGCSE '00 Paper Acceptance Rate 78 of 220 submissions, 35%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,787 of 5,146 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2462476.2465590
Chu MFan KMahlke S(2003)Region-based hierarchical operation partitioning for multicluster processorsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/780822.78116538:5(300-311)Online publication date: 9-May-2003
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/780822.781165
Lin JChen THsu WYew PJu RNgai TChan S(2003)A compiler framework for speculative analysis and optimizationsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/780822.78116438:5(289-299)Online publication date: 9-May-2003
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/780822.781164
Ertl MGregg D(2003)Optimizing indirect branch prediction accuracy in virtual machine interpretersACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/780822.78116238:5(278-288)Online publication date: 9-May-2003
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Inagaki TOnodera TKomatsu HNakatani T(2003)Stride prefetching by dynamically inspecting objectsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/780822.78116138:5(269-277)Online publication date: 9-May-2003
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Joisha PBanerjee P(2003)Static array storage optimization in MATLABACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/780822.78116038:5(258-268)Online publication date: 9-May-2003
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Ding CZhong Y(2003)Predicting whole-program locality through reuse distance analysisACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/780822.78115938:5(245-257)Online publication date: 9-May-2003
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Condit JHarren MMcPeak SNecula GWeimer W(2003)CCured in the real worldACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/780822.78115738:5(232-244)Online publication date: 9-May-2003
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