There are three different approaches to an introductory computer science course: technical competance, non-technical awareness, and a mixture of technical competance and non-technical awareness. This paper discusses the best strategy for a course aimed ...

The School of Advanced Technology currently has a number of courses that are used to better acclimate students on the graduate level to an industrial environment. This paper describes a two-course sequence designed for the undergraduate level that ...

Computer literacy, according to Richard Austing (1), is a major category of computer science education. Although computer literacy potentially involves the greatest number of people, achieving an ongoing program presents computer educators with ...

Problem solving is a task which is basic to many every day situations. Generally, people are not fully aware of the thought processes which enter into the solution of their particular situation. A problem presents itself and the solution, if determined, ...

A step-by-step presentation for the introductory computer science course which introduces the student to structured problem solving has been developed. By emphasizing the importance of “finding the pattern” and developing sequential algorithms from a ...

A framework on which a concept-oriented introductory computer science course can be based is presented and our experience in offering such a course to a special group of high school students is described. It is suggested that introductory college-level ...

This paper describes an approach that can introduce some of the concepts of software engineering to general business, engineering, and science students in an introductory FORTRAN programming course. The approach integrates the notions of top-down design,...

After having taught the design of algorithms for more than ten years I still find that recursive algorithms are much too difficult for most computer science students. There seem to be two problems: the students are unable to grasp the essence of an ...

In this paper it is shown how the topic of BASED storage in PL/I can be used to illustrate a wide variety of concepts in intermediate level courses in data structures and programming languages. Because most instructors introduce the topic only from the ...

The importance of recursive programming in an introductory computer science course is discussed from the viewpoint that the notions of 'process', 'program' and 'processor' are fundamental in computer programming. Several examples demonstrate how the ...

In the last few years it has been generally recognized that teaching programming involves more than describing a new FORTRAN statement each day and providing programming problems to be coded. The concepts of disciplined programming and the accompanying ...

In many disciplines, the introductory courses are well standardized as to what should be covered, how the subject is to be taught, and how student's performance is to be measured. Such is certainly not the case in Computer Science, where we constantly ...

This paper describes an attempt to provide realistic software development experience to a group of 15 students at North Texas State University. Each of the students had some previous programming experiences. Most of this experience was with higher level ...

This paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of teaching machine language programming to computer science undergraduate students. A teaching language based on reverse Polish notation, but with high-level control constructs, is presented as an ...

Computers are not easy to understand. Even a computer scientist who devotes full time to the field cannot hope to fully comprehend the capabilities, limitations, applications, and implications of these machines. Joseph Weizenbaum, in his recent book ...

Texas A&M University was involved for ten years in a program to train civilian engineers for the US Army. The engineer, the program's product, was to be capable of moving into positions of management and middle management within the civilian employment ...

Many consider that the best strategy to teach an introductory computer language course is to start programming very early in the semester. This paper discusses the drawbacks of such a strategy and presents an alternative way to teach such a course. ...

Because of the rapid growth of computing and its influence in schools and community colleges, we find we must teach a growing number of graduate teachers and administrators how to program. Because we firmly believe that the only programming worth doing ...

It is often difficult to select relevant and reasonable laboratory assignments in an introductory operating systems course. The students are seldom prepared to code intricate portions of an operating system, even if suitable hardware were available for ...