Teaching of Programming

"We worry less about catching cheaters. We worry more about properly assessing the student's skill set," Stallworth says. "Less percentage of the grade is from homework and more percentage is from the assessment, and the assessment is designed to truly [measure] skills. Then you can cheat on homework, but that's not going to help you with the assessment that counts for the bulk of your grade."

"We haven't seen an increase in failure rates," Stanford's Sahami says, adding that 5% or less of students typically fail introductory computer classes. "This is not a student body that accepts failure. For them to pass all of their classes is an important thing."

An online tool to practice problems from our Building Java Programs, 2nd edition textbook and from the University of Washington's introductory Java programming courses. Click a textbook chapter or category below to view its available problems.

In general, we teach computing by asking students to engage in the activity of professionals in the field: by programming.  We lecture to them and have them study texts, of course, but most of the learning is expected to occur through the practice of programming.  We teach programming by having students program.

After a half-century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly supports direct, strong instructional guidance rather than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of novice to intermediate learners.

Welcome to the UC-WISE module for CS10. This is where we will be hosting all of our lab guides and materials. Feel free to look around and play with the lab materials! The main website (http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs10) will host the readings and the semester schedule, while the bSpace site (http://bspace.berkeley.edu) will be used for announcements and forums.

The BlueJ environment was developed as part of a university research project about teaching object-orientation to beginners. The system is being developed and maintained by a joint research group at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, and the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. The project is supported by Sun Microsystems. The aim of BlueJ is to provide an easy-to-use teaching environment for the Java language that facilitates the teaching of Java to first year students. Special emphasis has been placed on visualisation and interaction techniques to create a highly interactive environment that encourages experimentation and exploration. BlueJ is based on the Blue system. Blue is an integrated teaching environment and language, developed at the University of Sydney and Monash University, Australia. BlueJ provides a Blue-like environment for the Java language.

Thoughts on using Prezi as a teaching tool - Ideas and reflections on the effective use of Prezi to support whole class teaching

Problets are problem solving software assistants for learning, reinforcement and assessment of programming concepts. They are designed to help students learn programming concepts through small-scale problem-solving, and as a supplement to large-scale programming traditionally used in introductory programming courses. At this site, you can find out more about the capabilities of the problets, their pedagogy, and about using them in your courses.

The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges contains the conference proceedings for each of the regional conference sponsored by CCSC. It is distributed to faculty in over 200 colleges. Past issues of the journal have included articles such as: CS Accreditation Update Putting More Science into Computer Science I Teaching Ada at the Senior Level Ethical and Professional Issues in Computing Closed Laboratories in an Entry-Level C Programming Course Computing Curricula at a Community College Conducting User-Friendly Internet Workshops Campus Data Networks: A Case Study Non-Isomorphic AVL-Trees Experiences with Scheme in a Liberal Arts Computing Course   Past issues of the Journal are archived in the ACM's Digital Library. There is open access to the CCSC archive section of the Digital Library. For your convienence, you can also access the library by conference proceeding. Note: You need an ACM account to access these documents. If you don't have one you can sign up for a free account, it is simple and easy!

Jeliot 3 is a Program Visualization application. It visualizes how a Java program is interpreted. Method calls, variables, operation are displayed on a screen as the animation goes on, allowing the student to follow step by step the execution of a program. Programs can be created from scratch or they can be modifyed from previously stored code examples. The Java program being animated does not need any kind of additional calls, all the visualization is automatically generated. Jeliot 3 understands most of the Java constructs and it is able to animate them. Especial effort is currenlty being addressed to animate object oriented features, such as inheritance.

The Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges is a non-profit organization focused on promoting quality computer-oriented curricula as well as effective use of computing in smaller institutions of higher learning which are typically non-research in orientation. It supports activities which assist faculty in making appropriate judgments concerning computing resources and educational applications of computer technology. Because departments in smaller colleges and universities are usually small and not highly specialized, the Consortium also encourages the sharing of expertise, effective curricula and efficient technological applications. The Consortium is concerned with the advancement of major programs in both Computer Science and Computer Information Systems, and with the use of computers in the Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Here is my collection of resources that I’ve found useful when working with students and teachers to create scratch projects. Please use the comments to inform me of any other good resources. Happy scratching

CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) is a workshop sponsored by Google to promote Computer Science in high school curriculum. With a grant from Google's Education Group, colleges develop a 2 day program for local high school CS teachers that incorporates informational talks by industry leaders, and discussions on new and emerging CS curricula at the high school level. On this site, you'll find information on how to hold a CS4HS workshop at your University, information for workshop attendees, and other helpful resources. We currently offer CS4HS grants in the US, Canada, and EMEA.