use of structured flowcharts in the undergraduate computer science curriculum
Over the last four years a new Computer Science major program has been introduced into the curriculum of the School of Engineering at Oakland University. During this period computer science educators throughout the country have debated the best way to introduce structured programming into the curriculum. There is now a widespread belief that beginning FORTRAN courses cannot be taught using structured programming in a form that is palatable to freshmen students without the aid of a structured FORTRAN preprocessor. Our experience in teaching structured programming using FORTRAN to large numbers of freshmen students has indicated that this widespread belief is false. We will illustrate the use of structured flowcharts with FORTRAN in Section 2 by showing one of the actual programming assignments that was given to our freshman introductory computer course this term. The same structured flowcharting techniques are used throughout the curriculum. An example that uses ALGOL and is taken from our junior level data structures class is given in Section 3. The use of the structured flowcharts forces all programs to be well-structured and encourages a top-down approach to programming. It is a very useful vehicle for describing any language-independent structured algorithm. An example of using structured flowcharts to describe a simple precedence parser in a senior course on compilers is given in Section 4.
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