This paper describes some unusual patterns that emerged from a statistical analysis of the 1988 Advanced Placement Exam in Computer Science. Most multiple-choice questions on the exam had few significant correlations with other parts of the exam. But a small set of five questions had a nontrivial correlation with many parts of the test. One question in particular demonstrated such correlations. It asked about the effect of the assignment statement "b := (b = false)" for a boolean variable b. One interpretation of this data is that these questions are testing general programming aptitude. The paper presents the analysis along with a discussion of the possible implications.
This paper describes a program that uses undergraduates as teaching assistants to staff large computer science classes, particularly at the introductory level. Creating such a program at a state school presented special challenges, but the program has become a mainstay for the department's undergraduate program. The program has been so successful that we have expanded it to cover some sophomore and junior level courses, including a discrete mathematics course. Among the benefits of the program are reduced overall cost, improved quality of instruction, the formation of an undergraduate community and the practical experience that the undergraduate teaching assistants themselves gain.
Java is fast becoming the language of choice in CS 1, but we have yet to figure out how to take full advantage of it's special features. The conservatives teach the old course in Java syntax. The radicals restructure the course to include Graphical User Interfaces (GUIse and concurrency. I prefer a "conservatively radical" middle ground where I use modem GUI programs to teach the old course concepts. I write GUI/concurrent code and ask my students to complete the program by supplying a particular class or two. Thus, they work on interesting problems without having to understand the details of how my code works. And in the process, they get a practical introduction to the modem programming experience of writing a small piece of a much larger program, allowing me to emphasize abstraction early.
In the past few years many schools have tried to simultaneously achieve the following goals in their introductory CS courses: Allow more students to enroll Improve the quality of education Keep spending at current levels Everyone has discovered that the first two goals are difficult to achieve in the presence of the third. This paper presents a model that has evolved over the last five years at Stanford University where all three goals have been accomplished by replacing graduate student TAs with undergraduate section leaders.
This paper describes a significant redesign of the introductory courses at the University of Washington that has led to increased enrollments, increased student satisfaction and an increase in the number of women admitted to the CS major. The new courses are still taught in Java, but they represent a return to the basics that were emphasized in the pre-Java era. The biggest changes have occurred in the CS1 course where we have replaced an "objects early" curriculum with a more traditional procedural approach using static methods in Java. The new CS1 course emphasizes problem solving, procedural decomposition and mastery of basic skills (e.g., loops, conditionals and arrays). The new CS2 course emphasizes data structures, linked lists, binary trees and recursion.
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