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Has the paradigm shift in CS1 a harmful effect on data structures courses: a case study

Published: 04 March 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The ongoing debate among Computer Science educators about the advantages and disadvantages of the shift from the procedural to the Object-Oriented paradigm usually relates to the introductory course. Indeed, we were also concerned when in our institute we decided to implement this shift in our introductory course and started to teach Java, instead of a procedural paradigm. In our previous study we saw that the effect of the shift did not lower the achievements of students taking the CS1 course. Furthermore, we wanted to be equally sure that this was the case when students take Data Structures courses. This is the focus of the study presented in this paper. The results show that there is no significant difference in the achievements of students who came from different paradigm backgrounds. This encouraging result probably relates to the fact that our CS1 course focuses on the fundamentals of introductory Computer Science and does not only emphasize the language aspects.

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  1. Has the paradigm shift in CS1 a harmful effect on data structures courses: a case study

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    Published In

    cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
    ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 41, Issue 1
    SIGCSE '09
    March 2009
    553 pages
    ISSN:0097-8418
    DOI:10.1145/1539024
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    • cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGCSE '09: Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
      March 2009
      612 pages
      ISBN:9781605581835
      DOI:10.1145/1508865
    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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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 04 March 2009
    Published in SIGCSE Volume 41, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. cs1
    2. data structures
    3. oop
    4. prodedural programming

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    Cited By

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    • (2011)Coping with Java as the core CS educational languageProceedings of the 16th Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education10.1145/1989622.1989632(38-42)Online publication date: 6-May-2011
    • (2011)Follow the river and you will find the CProceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education10.1145/1953163.1953285(411-416)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2011
    • (2023)Computer Science Education Research in IsraelPast, Present and Future of Computing Education Research10.1007/978-3-031-25336-2_18(395-420)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2023
    • (2018)Measuring students' attitudes toward information technologyJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/3199572.319958633:4(101-102)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2018
    • (2018)A study of knowledge retention in introductory programming coursesJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/3199572.319957433:4(13-20)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2018
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    • (2010)What do "CS1" and "CS2" mean?Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education10.1145/1734263.1734335(199-203)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2010

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