g_harrison@vger.nsu.edu (George C. Harrison, Norfolk State University) (04/18/91)
We are interested in getting some information on the teaching and practice of program design techniques in CS1 and CS2 - type of courses. We've had a lot of success getting ADT's into CS2 and other good "stuff," but I'd like to know some successful methods of teaching (and learning) program design. Background: Our "CS2" course probably doesn't live up to the FULL expectations of the ACM outline; we do cover abstract data types, stacks, queues, priority queues, some sorting, linear/binary searches, binary search trees, some tree stuff (traversals, depth, etc.), some algorithmic analysis, linked lists of all kinds, etc. We are using VAX Pascal at the moment. We have a full (a.k.a. Advanced) data structures course following this one. We don't have the capability at the moment to automate HIPO diagrams, structure charts, or data flow diagrams in the same programming environment. What is a good design method to teach and to use in such a course? Do you have your students hand in a design before they finish their program? How much time before? Are there relatively elementary graphical design packages available for this level of learning? Thanks... George... -- George C. Harrison ----------------------- ----- Professor of Computer Science ----------------------- ----- Norfolk State University ----------------------- ----- 2401 Corprew Avenue, Norfolk, Virginia 23504 ----------------------- ----- INTERNET: g_harrison@vger.nsu.edu ---------------------------------