Teaching CS/1 Courses in a Literate Manner
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Abstract:
The first course in Computer Science is often called `CS/1 ' based upon the designation in curriculae recommendations. The content of CS/1 courses often shows that it should include a significant amount of documentation, problem solving, problem formulation, : : : Experience has shown that instructors often slide into almost total emphasis on language syntax. Ask the student who has taken such a class as to its content and the answer usually comes back like "It was a C (or Pascal or: : : ) course." We will report on an experiment of teaching the honors section of our first course at Texas A&M University using Knuth's WEB. The primary advantage we saw in the use of the system is that the WEB system would enable the progression through the problem solving methodology by editing and extending the same document. Our analysis of data obtained by tracking the students in later semesters shows significant benefit from the use of literate programming. We found little or no problem using emacs, T E X, WEB, and requiring documentation after the initial scares in the course. We will describe how we taught the course, present performance statistics, and outline our recommendations for pursuit of similar goals. Finally, we will outline our longer range goals with the use of similar systems.
