Moving Away from Programming and Towards Computer Science in the CS First Year

After completing a pilot study using the Python programming language to transition to Java within our first-year introductory programming sequence, our department opted to make a more radical change. We assert that our students are better served in their first year of study by a focus on problems in computer science and their solutions, rather than programming. Our new introductory sequence emphasizes algorithm development and analysis, object-oriented design, and testing. As in our pilot, programming is first done in Python, switching to Java when object-oriented design and static typing become advantageous. Students reported liking the problem focus of the courses, while the distribution of grades remained similar to those in previous years. As a result, our department will be discontinuing our earlier introductory sequence, and offering the new problem-based one to all the groups of students our department services beginning in Fall 2010