SIGCSE

An undergraduate course in database design is described. The need for such a course, and its appropriateness in the undergraduate information systems curriculum is discussed. Finally, a number of general instructional difficulties are identified. It is ...

Many tools have been developed to aid in the systems analysis and design process. These same tools are used in teaching to help students better understand the process. This paper will discuss ways in which one tool, Entity Relationship (ER) models, can ...

A second course in Database Management which stresses database design principles is described. The first course emphasizes database implementation utilizing both a relational and a CODASYL database management system. Students become familiar with the ...

What are the opinions and biases of students entering this course today? What do these students think they know, what do they think they should be learning? Have their opinions been altered by the technological and software trends? Do younger and older ...

“Computerphobia” among adult learners is analogous to communication apprehension among adult speakers; consequently, techniques used by teachers of public speaking to ease stagefright can be adapted to the problem of overcoming fear of computers in ...

Which computer languages should we be teaching our students — and why? This paper examines the multitude of languages now available from three perspectives: classificatory, predictive, and pedagogical. It offers a “linguistic” analysis of computer ...

Modula-2 has been adopted as the primary programming language at New Mexico State University. This paper discusses the reasons which led to this choice of a new primary programming language. It compares some of the features of Pascal, Modula-2 and Ada. ...

For several years, the introductory assembly language course at Indiana-Purdue at Fort Wayne has used “structured” assembly language on an IBM System 370. A later course makes use of VAX-11 MACRO assembly language on a VAX 11/780. This paper shows how ...

A set of procedures to graphically display ordered and unordered trees has been developed. The procedures have been used in several class demonstration programs to illustrate tree insertion, deletion, and balancing algorithms. The procedures are ...

Immediately or soon after an introductory course in programming, traditional computer science education usually includes a course on data structures. Such courses, however, have suffered from a lack of non-textual materials for classroom and non-...

Modern programming practice advocates the use of abstract data types to aid in design, coding, and maintenance of programs [1]. Many students who are not computer majors will write programs as part of their jobs. Therefore, it is important to expose ...

Many computer science curricula use Special Topics courses as a vehicle to introduce students to new concepts and technologies. Although the same policy is practiced at our institution, one course required of our Associate Degree students provides a ...

Students think that security is crime prevention, someone else's business. In fact, security is error prevention and is everybody's business.

At government and industrial conferences employers complain that C.S. and C.I.S. graduates

• 1) don't see security ...

To be a successful business data processing professional, one should possess effective written and oral communication skills; therefore, any program which prepares computing students for the business world should effectively train them in this area. Of ...

In this paper we discuss our experiences using a translator writing system in the compiler construction course. We have found that such a system provides a great deal of flexibility to the instructor. Students can easily construct a complete compiler ...

The paper describes the experience gained by teaching a project-based course in Compiler Construction. The course is a blend of theoretical concepts and practical considerations that go into the development of a compiler. A project in compiler writing ...

The maturation of Computer System Performance Courses is briefly described giving excerpts from the two major ACM curriculum documents and providing a list of possible texts for such a course. It is then proposed that a course in performance evaluation ...

This paper describes our experience in using Ada as a vehicle for teaching Software Engineering concepts in a course for first year undergraduate students at the University of Montreal.

We first review the curriculum at our university and then give an ...

The specification of a system is a major problem. One useful technique is to involve users in the design process. This requires considerable skill on the part of the software professionals. As one component of our software engineering course we are ...

This paper describes a Senior Team Project Design course required of all Computer Science majors at our institution. The course is somewhat unique in that the students are divided into teams, all working on some aspect of the same problem. Thus, there ...

During the 1983-84 academic year, the University of Scranton instituted an experimental two semester discrete mathematics course for freshman students majoring in computer science. Approximately one-third of them were enrolled in this sequence while the ...

This study investigated the relationship between the student's grade in a beginning computer science course and their sex, age, high school and college academic performance, number of mathematics courses, and work experience. Standard measures of ...

This paper extends research on the use of the cloze test in the domain of computer software. In this study the cloze blanks were divided for the purposes of analysis into five structural subcategories. The relationships of the total cloze score and the ...

Readability and comprehensibility are among the most important attributes of a program. A program that is easy to read and understand is easier to test, maintain, and modify. Many factors affect program readability and comprehensibility, including ...

This paper describes an original method for introducing linear recurrence relations. Boolean expressions are represented by binary trees and the counting of the internal nodes of these trees yield linear recurrence relations. The method allows the ...

A scheme is presented for classifying recursive problems based upon an analysis of their parameters. Several well known recursive algorithms are then classified according to this scheme. The classification is used to determine if strategies for ...

A heuristic is given for finding minimal perfect hash functions without extensive searching. The procedure is to construct a set of graph (or hypergraph) models for the dictionary, then choose one of the models for use in constructing the minimal ...