TY - GEN
T1 - Ancestor worship in CS1
T2 - 19th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA'04
AU - Ventura, Phil
AU - Egert, Christopher
AU - Decker, Adrienne
PY - 2004
Y1 - 2004
N2 - History has given us the array as the fundamental data structure to present to students within the CS1 curriculum. However, with the recent growth in popularity of object-oriented languages for CS1 (C++, Java, C#), and with that, the acceptance of the objects-first or objects-early approach to teaching CS1, it becomes imperative that we re-evaluate our long-held beliefs about what is appropriate to teach. It is our position that the first data structure that students are exposed to should not be arrays, but rather some other form of collection. We will give some examples of how to use java.util. HashMap and some of the other Java Collections classes in substitution of arrays. We also present data concerning the academic performance of students using arrays versus those using Java Collections for CS1 lab exercises.
AB - History has given us the array as the fundamental data structure to present to students within the CS1 curriculum. However, with the recent growth in popularity of object-oriented languages for CS1 (C++, Java, C#), and with that, the acceptance of the objects-first or objects-early approach to teaching CS1, it becomes imperative that we re-evaluate our long-held beliefs about what is appropriate to teach. It is our position that the first data structure that students are exposed to should not be arrays, but rather some other form of collection. We will give some examples of how to use java.util. HashMap and some of the other Java Collections classes in substitution of arrays. We also present data concerning the academic performance of students using arrays versus those using Java Collections for CS1 lab exercises.
KW - Arrays
KW - CS1
KW - Curriculum
KW - Data structures
KW - Object oriented-design
KW - Object-oriented programming
KW - Objects-first
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/51849086605
U2 - 10.1145/1028664.1028700
DO - 10.1145/1028664.1028700
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 1581138334
SN - 9781581138337
T3 - Proceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA
SP - 68
EP - 72
BT - OOPSLA'04 - Conference Companion
Y2 - 24 October 2004 through 28 October 2004
ER -