Research shows that examples play an important role for cognitive skill acquisition. Students as well as teachers rank examples as important resources for learning to program. Therefore examples must be consistent with the principles and rules of the ...

The design of unit tests is a fundamental part of learning to design programs. We present a Java library that supports the design of tests for a novice programmer, together with the test evaluation, and the reporting of test results in an informative ...

Advanced programming and software engineering techniques are challenging to learn due to their inherent complexity. However, to the average student they are even more challenging because they have never experienced the context in which the techniques ...

We describe cs1graphics, a new Python drawing package designed with pedagogy in mind. The package is simple enough that students can sit down and make use of it from the first day of an introductory class. Yet it provides seamless support for ...

Dynamic memory management and the use of pointers are critical topics in teaching the C++ language. They are also some of the most difficult for students to grasp properly. The responsibility of ensuring that students understand these concepts does not ...

Test-Driven Design (TDD) has been shown to increase the productivity of programming teams and improve the quality of the code they produce. However, most of the introductory curricula provide no introduction to test design, no support for defining the ...

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 describe the Patterns+UML tool that has been designed to help students of a first year object-oriented programming (OOP) course to apply design patterns to UML class diagrams, to analyze the code generated after their application, and especially to ...

In this poster, we describe our experiences over the past three years in developing and delivering a compressed course in Software Development and Professional Practice for our computer science major. This course is one of the core courses in the CC2001 ...

Students can best understand the benefits of software design principles when they have to work on a project in which requirements change repeatedly in some substantial way over the course of a semester. This poster describes two different semester-long ...

Greenfoot is an educational IDE that makes it easy to write interactive graphical applications. It helps to solve several problems in the teaching and learning of object-oriented programming: It provides educational tools that aid in understanding ...

We demonstrate the use of a new Python graphics package named cs1graphics, while discussing its impact on pedagogy and showcasing the recent work of our students. Our package was originally developed with two goals in mind. First, we insisted that it be ...

We present four Java projects suggested by our student that were developed in Java CS1/CS2 course. What is in interest of our students who start programming? The answer might be different from the teachers or textbook approach. The themes include games, ...

There is an ongoing debate regarding the role of object orientation in the introductory programming sequence. While the pendulum swings to and fro between the "objects first" and "back to basics" extremes, there is general agreement that object-oriented ...

Teaching students to incorporate template classes into their C++ projects is an important concept in object-oriented programming. The most efficient implementation method for template classes is dependent on several factors. Two significant factors are ...

In the general sphere of the teaching of software engineering concepts, it can be noted that there are very few pieces of work dealing with how to get across, through teaching, the practical experience that has been built up on the subject of object-...

This paper describes provision of support for the implementation of fundamental class relationships through the use of a tool previously created for teaching design patterns.