Adding some spice to CS1 curricula

Abstract

CSl curricula that focus primarily on teaching programming skills may fail to give students a sense of the breadth of topics to which a knowledge of computability might apply. We attempt to correct for this by adding a survey of computing concepts into our introductory course. Sophisticated topics usually reserved for senior level courses are presented in a popular science manner, and given equal time alongside the essential introductory programming material. By exposing students to a broad range of specific computational problems we endeavour to make their first course more interesting and enjoyable, and instil in them a sense of vision for areas they might specialise in as computing majors.

Encouraging the development of undergraduate researchers in computer vision

“…Our department currently serves only upper-division students, with students performing their lower-division work at community colleges or four-year universities. This means that the earliest opportunity for me to introduce students to images is in our first programming course at the junior level, although there is no reason that it could not be introduced earlier in other universities (and, indeed, is [2,5,6,8]). Other examples of using images in core computer science courses can be found in [3,10,12].…”

Teaching applied computing without programming

“…Holmes and Smith describe a CS1 curriculum in which half of the course is devoted to a survey of computing concepts such as text compression, resource scheduling, searching, sorting, and graph algorithms; the remainder of the course is devoted to traditional programming fare [1]. Perhaps the best-known work in this area is that of Alan Biermann, who presents a number of the intellectual achievements in the field of computer science in his Great Ideas in Computer Science textbook [2].…”