another approach to teaching programming concept course with object first
In an effort to better prepare students for success as a CS/CIS major, the Computer Science department at California Lutheran University introduced a pre-programming course four years ago. The course helped to increase the level of following two java programming courses. However programming concepts taught with its procedural language approach still left a large gap to Java programming courses. The course was overhauled in two ways. One is the paradigm shift from procedural language to object oriented programming language. The other is using a modern programming language environment with awareness of learning styles of students nowadays. The 3D interactive animated tool "Alice" is used in class and class is conducted as a studio model format. The preliminary result shows a positive response from students. This is a work in progress and evaluation will be continued at the start and the end of each semester. In this paper, we describe the need of a pre-programming course in general, design of our first course, design of the current pre-programming course with an object oriented paradigm and some findings.
programming concepts object oriented programming alice attrition rate problem solving 3d animation innovative teaching logical reasoning