Using image processing projects to teach CS1 topics

Abstract

As Computer Science educators, we know that students learn more from projects that are fun and challenging, that seem "real" to them, and that allow them to be creative in designing their solutions. When we have students beating down our office doors wanting to show us what they've done, we know we have designed a project that truly meets its pedagogical goals. In CS1 courses, it is often difficult to come up with large, real-world programming projects that are at an appropriate level and that really excite students. This is particularly true in the first half of the course when students are learning basic programming and problem solving skills. We found that assignments based on image processing are an effective way to teach many CS1 topics. Because students enjoy working on the projects, they come away with a solid understanding of the topics reinforced by the projects. In this paper, we discuss many ways in which image processing could be used to teach CS1 topics. As an example, we present two image processing projects that we use in our CS1 course. These large, real-world programs are designed so that students can successfully master them early in their first semester of programming. Even though our CS1 course is taught using the C programming language, these projects could easily be used by a CS1 course in C, C++, or Java. We provide starting point code for Java and C versions of the projects, and provide sample assignment write-ups on our project webpage [12].

Event-driven Programming in Programming Education

“…A little later, Christensen and Caspersen [2002] published their Presenter framework as an alternative approach to teaching object-oriented and edp concepts in cs1. Wicentowski and Newhall [2005] approached teaching cs1 and edp through assignments centered around image manipulation. Their publication focused on describing their assignments but they also reported a positive response from students to this approach.…”

Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

“…Following the success of media computation for nonmajors [233] there have been several reports of introductory programming courses that use image processing as a motivating context [165,421,542,707].…”

Graphics‐Based Learning in First‐Year Computer Science

“…Indeed, allowing students to explore image processing topics is becoming popular, due primarily to the interest generated by such projects and the basic computer science principles they reinforce. Working with such projects is interesting to a wide range of students, from elementary school [MV05] to college [WN05][AR98][Bur03][FP97][Hun03] since students react positively to visual results and working on real‐world problems.…”

“…Previous work involving rendering techniques or image processing in CS1 has been performed on a limited scale. Some approaches have provided ready‐made GUI environments [AR98], code for function prototypes [WN05], and pre‐written functions [AR98][Bur03][FP97][Hun03] to handle various types of image manipulation. Also, image processing is but just one of several projects used in courses under these approaches.…”