John S. Mallozzi

A course in programming languages for educational computing

A course in programming language s taught as part of a computer scienc e program generally has as its audience a group of students with experience i n assembly language programming, compute r architecture, and some knowledge of dat a structures and algorithms. In a n educational computing curriculum, on th e other hand, the available background i s ordinarily less technical. Furthermore , while computer science students will hav e studied Pascal, or a similar language , and, perhaps, LISP, educational computin g students will have most experience wit h BASIC, some Pascal, and perhaps, LOGO. Available textbooks, such as [1] an d [2], are directed toward the compute r science student, and are not reall y suitable for students of educationa l computing, both because of the level o f presentation and because of the focus o f the texts. Nevertheless, a course. i n programming languages, in which desig n issues are discussed and comparisons ar e made, with the focus on issues o f importance in educational computing, is a valuable one. At Iona College, I have taught a course in programming languages in ou r graduate program in educationa l computing. The course has been offere d three times to date. In this article, I describe the course syllabus and som e conclusions I reached about th e effectiveness of the course and th e difficulty of working without a text o r any readily available information on ho w to structure the course. The class was scheduled to meet in a n ordinary classroom, but I could, wit h advance notice, hold class in a microcomputer laboratory. The laborator y contained enough IBM Personal Computers t o provide each student with one during th e class. In addition, a large-scree n projection monitor was available o n request. Students were free to come t o the lab outside class hours to use th e software, as well. All students who registered for th e course had completed at least two course s in programming, mostly using BASIC. Most , but not all had completed a course i n Pascal programming, but had not gotte n very far into the language. I n particular, not very much had been don e with parameters ; seeping of variables wa s not a very familiar concept ; and pointer s were, essentially, unknown. A fe w students …

Binary trees á la STL

Introduction With the arrival of a standard library for C!++ [l], particularly its container class templates the Standard Template Library (STL) the questions arise whether and how to incorporate this material in the teaching of data structures, During the 1995-‘96 academic year, the author chose one approach to this material. This paper discusses his treatment of binary trees using this approach.