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"This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0940932. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation."

"Python is a powerful and expressive language that has very simple syntax. If you're unsure of which programming language to learn, Python is a great choice. The language is used in a variety of disciplines: application, web, and game development. Python can do it all. Courses are based on Python 2.7.3."

Textbook. The textbook Algorithms, 4th Edition by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne [ Amazon · Pearson · InformIT ] surveys the most important algorithms and data structures in use today. The textbook is organized into six chapters: Chapter 1: Fundamentals introduces a scientific and engineering basis for comparing algorithms and making predictions. It also includes our programming model. Chapter 2: Sorting considers several classic sorting algorithms, including insertion sort, mergesort, and quicksort. It also includes a binary heap implementation of a priority queue. Chapter 3: Searching describes several classic symbol table implementations, including binary search trees, red-black trees, and hash tables. Chapter 4: Graphs surveys the most important graph processing problems, including depth-first search, breadth-first search, minimum spanning trees, and shortest paths. Chapter 5: Strings investigates specialized algorithms for string processing, including radix sorting, substring search, tries, regular expressions, and data compression. Chapter 6: Context highlights connections to systems programming, scientific computing, commercial applications, operations research, and intractability.

Can We Fix Computer Science Education in America?

Doug, thank you for the link to the article. I just spent a few days in Boston with CS Educators at the App Inventor Summit and the issues discussed in this article now make more sense to me. The CS Principles project (csprinciples.org) looks like a huge step in the right direction. It "could" become the foundation of introductory CS courses in high school (AP) and in post-secondary. They have run 2 years of pilot courses and it looks promising. The next generation AP exam will likely be language agnostic - designs will likely be expressed in pseudocode and the course really engages with students (not just programming).

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