Informing Science + IT Education Conference 2003 Proceedings


Abstracts

Informing Science + IT Education Conference

Pori, Finland June 24-27, 2003





docs\171Rouss.pdf Paper Accepted as a/n Best Paper pages
1353-1360

Teaching Introduction to Programming as Part of the IS Component of the Business

Boris Roussev

Susquehanna University, USA

Modern software practices call for the active involvement of business people in the software process. Therefore,

programming has become an indispensable part of the IS component of the core curriculum at business schools. In

this paper, we present a model-based approach to teaching introduction to pro-gramming to general business

students. The underpinnings of the new approach are modeling, abstrac-tion, and Bloom's classification of

cognitive skills. We employ models to introduce the basic program-ming constructs and their semantics. To this

end, we use statecharts to model object's state, the environ-ment model of evaluation as a virtual machine

interpreting the programs written in JavaScript, and UML class diagrams to represent the static structure of the

designed software systems. The adoption of this approach helps learners build a sound mental model of the notion

of computation process. Learners' achievements, student evaluations, and our subjective opinion suggest that the

proposed ideas improve the course significantly.

Keywords: introduction to programming, model-based approach, teaching programming

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ISSN 1535-07-03
Unless otherwise indicated, this paper has undergone blind external review by three or more reviewers.
Types of Papers: A Best Paper, Regular Paper, Short Paper, Informal Paper, Unrefereed Panel Paper